Jennifer Lam will present her General Exam "Thermopylae: Exploiting Skew in High Throughput Distributed Databases" on Wednesday, May 11, 2022 at 2:00 PM in Friend 202 and via Zoom. Zoom link: [ https://princeton.zoom.us/j/95920790720 | https://princeton.zoom.us/j/95920790720 ] Committee Members: Wyatt Lloyd (advisor), Michael Freedman, Amit Levy Abstract: Distributed databases scale out by spreading data across many machines, which allows them to support large-scale applications whose data is too large to fit on a single-machine database. This scalability introduces a dilemma, however, as the throughput of distributed databases is much lower than that of modern single-machine databases for skewed workloads. This paper eliminates this dilemma as much as possible. We present Thermopylae, the first distributed database that is able to both support large-scale applications and match its throughput to single-machine databases under skewed workloads. Central to Thermopylae is a novel hybrid architecture that embeds a high-performance single-machine database into a highly scalable distributed database. Thermopylae applies a specialized concurrency control protocol designed for its hybrid architecture. Our evaluation shows that Thermopyale achieves orders of magnitude better performance than a state-of-the-art distributed database and closely matches its throughput to a modern single-machine database under skewed workloads. Reading List: [ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JyKq72qi2xchJu8OH710RTF2m41E8Tf2hUgzCG-_... | https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JyKq72qi2xchJu8OH710RTF2m41E8Tf2hUgzCG-_... ] Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. Louis Riehl Graduate Administrator Computer Science Department, CS213 Princeton University (609) 258-8014