Distinguished Colloquium Speaker
Dahlia Malkhi, until recently from Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley
Tuesday, November 18, 4:30pm
Computer Science 105

CorfuDB: Transactional Data Services over a Shared Log

Conventional wisdom has it that the only way to scale replicated services is by partitioning the data. What would you do if given an infrastructure that breaks the seeming tradeoff between consistency and scale?

The talk will describe our experience with building CorfuDB, a distributed fabric that drives consistency and transactional guarantees at high-throughput. CorfuDB facilitates building distributed services in which in-memory data-structures are backed by a shared log. The core is built around the CORFU log, which clients can append-to and read-from over a network. Internally, CORFU is distributed over a cluster of machines with no single I/O bottleneck to either appends or reads. Atop CORFU is Tango, a fabric for programming transactional data services such as the Hyder DB and an Apache-ZooKeeper alternative.

Dahlia Malkhi has been a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley from 2004 until the lab shut down in Sep 2014. She works on applied and foundational research in reliability, consistency and security of distributed computing since the early nineties.

Prior to joining Microsoft Research, Dr. Malkhi was an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1999-2007), left for a brief sabbatical, but was bitten by the Silicon Valley bug and remained at Microsoft. She holds a PhD (1994), M.Sc and B.Sc in computer science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, making her the only CS faculty to return to the Hebrew U. for all four academic stages. Dr. Malkhi was elected an ACM fellow in 2011, received the IBM Faculty award in 2003 and 2004 and the German-Israeli Foundation (G.I.F.) Young Scientist award in 2002. She serves on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions of Dependable and Secure Computing and of the Distributed Computing Journal. She chaired LADIS 2012 , Locality 2007, PODC 2006, Locality 2005 and DISC 2002.