[talks] Syslunch presentation by Marc Shapiro (NOW!)

[Sapan Bhatia]

Marc Shapiro is a director of research with INRIA and the chairmain of
Eurosys, the ACM SIGOPS chapter of Europe.

He is going to give a talk in today's systems lunch:

Speaker: Marc Shapiro, INRIA and LIP6
Title: Telex: A Principled Platform for Peer-to-Peer Collaboration

Abstract:

Developers of co-operative applications encounter difficult issues of
distributed state, disconnections, and conflicts.  Our approach is to
factor these system issues out from application logic, but we
recognise that they cannot be entirely divorced.  The Telex platform
that we designed is application-independent, but parameterised by
application-specific information.  An application provides Telex with
actions (operations) and constraints (invariants).  In return, Telex
takes care of replication and persistence, drives application progress
while verifying its invariants, and ensures that replicas eventually
agree on a correct, common state.  Time permitting, I will present a
number of contributions.  I show by example how application design
proceeds from high-level invariants to actions and constraints, and
how the platform ensures application safety and liveness.  The main
data structure of Telex is a large, replicated, very dynamic graph; I
discuss the engineering trade-offs for such a graph and our solutions.
I describe our how Telex ensures, in the background, that replicas
converge to a safe state.  Finally, I describe experimental evaluation
of the Telex platform.

Joint work with Lamia Benmouffok, Jean-Michel Busca, Joan Manuel
Marquhs, Marc Shapiro, Pierre Sutra, Georgios Tsoukalas