Please note: This seminar will be given online.
Aishwarya
Ganesan,
Postdoctoral
Researcher
VMware
Research
The tradeoff between performance and correctness is pervasive across computer systems such as shared-memory multiprocessors, databases, and local file systems. The same tradeoff exists in distributed storage systems as well; designers must often choose consistency or performance but not both. In this talk, I will show how we can build distributed storage systems that provide strong guarantees yet also perform well.
In the first part of the talk, I will show how to improve the consistency guarantees of weak systems without impacting their performance. In particular, I will present consistency-aware durability or CAD, a new approach to durability in distributed storage that enables stronger consistency while delivering high performance. We demonstrate the efficacy of CAD by designing cross-client monotonic reads, a novel and strong consistency property.
In the second part, I will show how to improve the performance without endangering strong consistency. Standard approaches to building strongly consistent storage usually incur high coordination overhead. I will show that much of this coordination is unnecessary if the storage interface semantic is carefully exploited. I will introduce the notion of nil-external interfaces and show how NilPaxos, a new replication protocol that exploits nil-externality, can provide high performance.
Bio: Aishwarya Ganesan is a postdoctoral researcher at VMware research. She recently earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, working with Prof. Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau and Prof. Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau. She is broadly interested in distributed systems and storage systems. Aishwarya’s research has been recognized with best-paper awards at FAST 20 and FAST 18 and a best paper award nomination at FAST 17. She was selected for the Rising Stars in EECS 18 workshop and is a recipient of a Facebook 2019 PhD Fellowship. She also received the graduate student instructor award for teaching graduate-level distributed systems at UW Madison.
To join this seminar on Zoom, please go to https://zoom.us/j/92268050403?pwd=bVZyS2Nmc2QwRGZOQzNSbzBCM3ROUT09.