Title: Swiftcloud: conflict-free objects at large scale
Speaker: Marc Shapiro (INRIA & LIP6)
Joint work with:
Nuno Preguiça, U. Nova de Lisboa
Marek Zawirski, INRIA & UPMC
Annette Bieniusa, INRIA & LIP6
Carlos Baquero, U. Minho
Eventual Consistency (EC) is essential for availability and scalability of geo-replication, but existing EC approaches are ad-hoc and error-prone. Our Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) are based on theoretically sound and simple sufficient conditions. We consider the design of a CRDT to ensure that it has intuitive semantics and that it uses memory efficiently.
We also describe our Swiftcloud platform, designed to simplify the implementation of applications sharing objects at extreme scale, very close to clients at the network edge. Swiftcloud extends the CRDT guarantees (with transactional consistency, causal consistency, and session guarantees) without violating conflict-freedom. We describe some proof-of-concept applications (social network, bookstore, file system) and report on their performance, which is greatly improved over the classical synchronisation-based approach
Bio: Marc Shapiro is a researcher in distributed and concurrent systems at INRIA in Paris (France). His research topics include large-scale distributed computing systems, focusing on data replication and consistency, especially in the wide area and in disconnected operation.
After his PhD at LAAS (Toulouse), Marc Shapiro did his research at MIT (Cambridge, USA), CMIRH (Paris, France), INRIA (Rocquencourt, France), Cornell University (Ithaca, USA), Sun Microsystems (Chelmsford, USA), and Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK). He is currently a senior researcher for INRIA in the Regal group (INRIA-LIP6).
Home page: http://lip6.fr/Marc.Shapiro/