December 11, 2013
In the world of distributed systems, there are still a lot of unsolved problems and improvements to be made. This means that there is a lot of interesting research being done at top institutions around the world – with some of the brightest minds looking to improve distributed systems. At RICON West, Riak’s developer conference, we brought three PhD students and candidates to speak, whose work on distributed systems has been vital to both Riak and the future of the industry.
Peter Bailis is a PhD student at UC Berkeley. His talk, ”Bad As I Wanna Be: Coordination and Consistency in Distributed Databases”, goes into how to reason about the trade-offs between coordination, consistency, latency, and availability, with a focus on practical takeaways from recent research both at UC Berkeley and beyond. He also talks about reconciling “consistency” in NoSQL and ACID databases and explains why, even though you probably didn’t “beat the CAP Theorem,” you (and tomorrow’s database designs) may be on to something.
Lindsey Kuper is a PhD candidate at Indiana University, who studies the foundations of deterministic parallel programming. At RICON, she spoke on “LVars: Lattice-Based Data Structures for Deterministic Parallelism,” which introduces LVars (data structures that enable deterministic parallel programming). LVars generalize the single-assignment variables often found in deterministic parallel languages to allow multiple assignments that are monotonically increasing with respect to a user-specified lattice of states. LVars maintain determinism by allowing only monotonic writes and “threshold” reads to and from shared data. Her talk looks at examples of programming in an LVar-based parallel language that is provably deterministic, and explores the connection between LVars and CRDTs.
Finally, we had Diego Ongaro, a PhD student at Stanford University, talk about “The Raft Consensus Algorithm.” His talk discusses Raft, a consensus algorithm designed for understandability and developed by Diego and Professor John Ousterhout. Raft is equivalent to Paxos in fault-tolerance and performance, but it’s designed to be as easy to understand as possible, while cleanly addressing all major pieces needed for practical systems. The hope is that Raft will make consensus available to a wider audience, and that this wider audience will be able to develop a wider variety of higher quality consensus-based systems than are available today.
