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Date: Monday May 11th 2015, 14:15
Place: Lille Aud, Realfagsbygget, UiT
Title: "Salt: Combining ACID and BASE in a Distributed Database"
Lecturer: Professor Lorenzo Alvisi, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
What is the right abstraction to support scalable and available storage and retrieval of data in a distributed database? Today's options - ACID transactions and BASE implementations - force developers to compromise either ease of programming or performance. This talk will discuss Salt, a new database that allows the ACID and BASE paradigms to {\em coexist} in order to combine the desirable qualities of both. Salt is based on the observation, rooted in Pareto' s principle, that, when an application outgrows the performance and availability offered by an ACID implementation, it is often because of the requirements of only a few transactions: most transactions never test the limits of what ACID can offer. Through the new abstraction of BASE transactions, Salt allows to safely ''BASE-ify'' only those few performance-critical ACID transactions, without compromising the ACID guarantees enjoyed by the remaining transactions: in so doing, Salt can reap most of the performance benefits of the BASE paradigm, without unleashing the cost and complexity that traditionally come with it.
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Date: Tuesday May 12th 2015, 10:15
Place: Store Aud, Realfagsbygget, UiT
Title: "High performance ACID distributed databases via Modular Concurrency Control"
Lecturer: Professor Lorenzo Alvisi, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
Since the elegant foundations of transaction processing were established in the mid 70’s with the notion of serializability and the codification of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) paradigm, performance has not been considered one of ACID’s strong suits, especially for distributed data stores. Indeed, the NoSQL/BASE movement was born out of frustration with the limited scalability of traditional ACID solutions, only to become itself a source of frustration once the challenges of programming applications in this new paradigm began to sink in. But how fundamental is the dichotomy between performance and ease of programming?
This talk will describe Callas, a distributed database system that aims to unlock the performance potential of the ACID transactional paradigm, without sacrificing the generality and ease of programming that define it.
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Date: Wednesday May 13th 2015, 10:15
Place: Store Aud, Realfagsbygget, UiT
Title: "Reasoning with MAD distributed systems"
Lecturer: Professor Lorenzo Alvisi, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
Decentralized approaches spanning multiple administrative domains (MAD) are an increasingly effective way to deploy services. Popular examples include peer-to-peer (p2p) applications, content distribution networks, and mesh routing protocols. Cooperation lies at the heart of these services. Yet, when working together is crucial, a natural question is: "What if users stop cooperating?" After all, users in a MAD system are vulnerable not only to the failure of some of the equipment in the system, or to the possibility that some users may behave maliciously, but also to the possibility that users may selfishly refrain from sharing their resources as the protocol would require.
In this setting, it is hard to put a bound on the number of components in the systems that deviate from their correct specification. Is it still possible under such circumstances to build systems that not only provide provable guarantees in terms of their safety and liveness properties but also yield practical performance?
Short CV
Lorenzo Alvisi holds an Endowed Professorship in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he co-leads the Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research (LASR). He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, which he joined after earning a Laurea degree Summa cum Laude in Physics from the University of Bologna, Italy. His research interests are in the theory and practice of distributed computing, with a particular focus on dependability. He is a Visiting Chair Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a Fellow of the ACM, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award and of an NSF Career Award. He serves on the Editorial Boards of ACM TOCS and Springer’s Distributed Computing and is a council member of the CRA’s Computing Community Consortium. In addition to distributed computing, he is passionate about classical music and red Italian motorcycles.
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