[Pl-seminar] 11/13 10:30am Seminar: Suresh Jagannathan, Declarative Programming for Eventual Consistency

[William J. Bowman]

NUPRL Seminar presents

Suresh Jagannathan
Purdue University

Host: Jan Vitek
10:30--11:30
Friday, Nov. 13th 2015
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)


Declarative Programming for Eventual Consistency

Abstract:
In geo-replicated distributed data stores, the need to ensure responsiveness
in the face of network partitions and processor failures results in
implementations that provide only weak (so-called eventually consistent)
guarantees on when data updated by one process becomes visible to another.
Applications must be carefully constructed to be aware of unwanted
inconsistencies permitted by such implementations (e.g., having negative
balances in a bank account, or having an item appear in a shopping cart
after it has been removed), but must balance correctness concerns with
performance and scalability needs.  Because understanding these tradeoffs
requires subtle reasoning and detailed knowledge about the underlying data
store, implementing robust distributed applications in such environments is
often an error-prone and expensive task.

To overcome these issues, this talk presents a declarative programming model
for eventually consistent data stores called Quelea.  The model comprises a
contract language, capable of defining fine-grained application-level
consistency properties for replicated data types (and transactions over
objects of these types), and a contract enforcement system to analyze
contracts and automatically generate the appropriate consistency protocol
for the method protected by the contract.  By doing so, Quelea enables
programmers to reason compositionally about consistency from the perspective
of high-level application requirements, not low-level implementation
features.

This is joint work with Gowtham Kaki and K.C. Sivaramakrishnan.


Bio:
Suresh Jagannathan is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University
where he has been on leave since September 2013, serving as a program
manager in the Information Innovation Office at DARPA.  He has also been a
visiting faculty at Cambridge University, where he spent a sabbatical year
in 2010; and, prior to joining Purdue, was a senior research scientist at
the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J.  He received his Ph.D from
MIT.

His research interests are in programming languages generally, with specific
focus on compilers, functional programming, program verification, and
concurrent and distributed systems.  At DARPA, he manages programs on
probabilistic programming and machine learning (PPAML), program synthesis
and repair leveraging predictive analytics over large software corpora
(MUSE), and self-adaptive software through resource-aware analyses,
runtimes, and architectures (BRASS).

-- 
William J. Bowman

Northeastern University
College of Computer and Information Science
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.ccs.neu.edu/pipermail/pl-seminar/attachments/20151105/d8078b8e/attachment.pgp>