MPI-INF Logo
Campus Event Calendar

Event Entry

What and Who

Generalized Universality

Rachid Guerraoui
EPFL
SWS Distinguished Lecture Series

Rachid Guerraoui is professor of Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne where he leads the Distributed Programming Laboratory. Rachid is fellow of the ACM and has recently been awarded an advanced ERC grant and a Google focused award. He has also been affiliated in the past with the Research Center of Ecole des Mines de Paris, the Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique in Saclay,  Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

AG 1, AG 2, AG 3, AG 4, AG 5, SWS, RG1, MMCI  
Expert Audience
English

Date, Time and Location

Wednesday, 12 November 2014
10:30
90 Minutes
G26
111
Kaiserslautern

Abstract

Replicated state machine is a fundamental computing construct for it essentially makes a distributed system emulate a highly available, centralized one, using a consensus abstraction through which processes agree on common decisions. The idea is at the heart of the fault-tolerance of most data centers today. Any sequential object is modeled by a state machine that can be replicated over all processes of the system and accessed in a wait-free manner: we talk about the universality of the construct and of its underlying consensus abstraction. Yet, consensus is just a special case of a more general abstraction, k-set consensus, where processes agree on at most k different decisions. It is natural to ask whether there exists a generalization of state machine replication with k-set agreement, for otherwise distributed computing would not deserve the aura of having an underpinning Theory as 1 (k-set consensus with k=1) would be special. The talk will recall the classical state machine replication construct and show how, using k-set consensus as an underlying abstraction, the construct can be generalized to implement k state machines of which at least one makes progress, generalizing in a precise sense the very notion of consensus universality. The work is a joint work with Eli Gafni 

Contact

Claudia Richter
9303 9103
--email hidden

Video Broadcast

Yes
Saarbrücken
E1 5
002
passcode not visible
logged in users only

Claudia Richter, 11/04/2014 11:44 -- Created document.