[talks] J Nelson general exam

[Melissa M. Lawson]

Jude Nelson will re-present the oral exam portion of his 
research seminar/general exam on Tuesday October 16 at 9AM 
in Room 402.  The members of his committee are:  Larry Peterson
(advisor), Michael Freedman, and Vivek Pai.  Any additional 
faculty members wishing to attend are welcome to do so.
His abstract and reading list follow below.
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Abstract:
It is well understood that network caches offer three potential
advantages to cloud storage providers: they reduce read latency, they scale read bandwidth, and
they reduce the amount of data that must be transferred directly from
the datacenter (which incur some cost).  Network caches "extend" cloud
storage into the readers' edge networks--read requests are serviced by nearby
network caches instead of upstream cloud storage.  However, the same cannot
be said for writers--a writer must upload data synchronously to upstream storage.
Additionally, network caches may serve readers stale or even corrupt data in the
presence of writes.

To remedy this, we propose Syndicate--a distributed wide-area storage
service that extends cloud storage to the edge of the network for both readers and writers.  
Syndicate provides readers the performance benefits and
download transfer savings enabled by underlying CDNs and caching
proxies, while at the same time guaranteeing that readers see the
effects of all completed writes. It also provides writers the
performance benefits of network-local storage by reducing the amount
of data that must be synchronously uploaded to cloud storage on each
write. Finally, by organizing data into a hierarchical namespace, and
by allowing concurrent reads and writes on records while enforcing a
sequential history of record creation and deletion, Syndicate provides
applications with filesystem-like storage semantics similar to many
existing cloud storage services.

Syndicate makes two contributions over existing wide-area storage systems.  First, it simultaneously
leverages CDNs and other edge caches while also supporting a well-defined consistency model in
the face of writes. Second, it uses a ``built from parts'' design strategy,
whereby Syndicate is effectively layered on top of a disparate set of
commodity components.  Syndicate manages naming and consistency,
existing cloud storage services enhance data persistence, and
unmodified CDNs offer the performance and cost advantages outlined above.


Reading list:
Peterson, Larry L., and Davie, Bruce S.  "Computer Networks, a Systems Approach. 4th Ed."
Cerf, V., and Kahn, R.  "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication."
Lamport, L.  "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system."
Schneider, F.  "Implementing Fault-Tolerant Services Using the State Machine Approach: A Tutorial"
Park, K. and Pai, V.  "Scale and Performance in the CoBlitz Large-File Distribution Service."
L. Wang, V. Pai, and Peterson, L.  "The Effectiveness of Request Redirection on CDN Robustness."
Annapureddy, S., Freedman, M., and Mazieres, D.  "Shark : Scaling File Servers via Cooperative Caching."
Burrows, M.  "The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems."
Peterson, L., Bavier, A., Fiuczynski, M., Muir, S.  "Experineces Building PlanetLab."
Belaramani, N., Dahlin, M., Gao, L., et. al.  "PRACTI Replication."
Stribling, J., Sovran, Y., Zhang, I., et. al.  "Flexible , Wide-Area Storage for Distributed Systems with WheelFS."
Freedman, M., Freudenthal, E., Mazieres, D.  "Democratizing content publication with Coral."
Vahdat, A., Eastham, P., Yoshikawa, C., et. al.  "WebOS: Operating System Services for Wide Area Applications."