Jeff Terrace will present his research seminar/general exam on Friday May 8 at 2PM in Room 302 (note room). The members of his committee are: Mike Freedman, advisor, Jennifer Rexford, and Vivek Pai. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. --------------------------------------------------- Abstract: Massive storage systems typically replicate and partition data over many potentially-faulty components to provide both reliability and scalability. Yet many commercially- deployed systems, especially those designed for inter- active use by customers, sacrifice stronger consistency properties in the desire for greater availability and higher throughput. I will present the design, implementation, and evaluation of CRAQ, a distributed object-storage system that challenges this inflexible tradeoff. The basic approach, an improvement on Chain Replication, maintains strong consistency while greatly improving read throughput. By distributing load across all object replicas, CRAQ scales linearly with chain size without increasing consistency coordination. At the same time, it exposes non- committed operations for weaker consistency guarantees when this suffices for some applications, which is especially useful under periods of high system churn. I will explore additional design and implementation considerations for geo-replicated CRAQ storage across multiple datacenters to provide locality-optimized operations. I will also discuss multi-object atomic updates and multicast optimizations for large-object updates. Reading List: [1] G. DeCandia, D. Hastorun, M. Jampani, G. Kakula-pati, A. Lak-shman, A. Pilchin, S. Sivasubramanian, P. Vosshall, and W. Vogels. Dynamo: Amazon’s highly available key-value store. [2] R. Guerraoui, D. Kostic, R. R. Levy, and V. Quma. A high throughput atomic storage algorithm. [3] R. van Renesse and F. B. Schneider. Chain replication for supporting high throughput and availability. [4] I. Stoica, R. Morris, D. Liben-Nowell, D. Karger, M. F. Kaashoek, F. Dabek, and H. Balakrishnan. Chord: A scalable peer-to-peer lookup protocol for Internet applications. [5] M. Burrows. The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems. [6] S. Ghemawat, H. Gobioff, and S.-T. Leung. The google ?le system. [7] M. Castro and B. Liskov. Practical byzantine fault tolerance. [8] B. F. Cooper, R. Ramakrishnan, U. Srivastava, A. Silberstein, P. Bohannon, H.-A. Jacobsen, N. Puz, D. Weaver, and R. Yerneni. PNUTS:Yahoo!'s Hosted Data Serving Platform. [9] M. K. Aguilera, A. Merchant, M. Shah, A. Veitch, and C. Karamanolis. Sinfonia: a new paradigm for building scalable distributed systems. In Proc. SOSP, Oct. 2007. [10] K. P. Berman. Reliable Distributed Systems, Chapters 13-19.