[Colloq] Colloq Spkr- Wednesday @ 1pm

[Chantal Cardona]

**

* *

*College** of **Computer** and Information Science Colloquium*

Presents:

*Rachid Guerraoui (EPFL/MIT)*

Who will speak on:

*What is “hard” in distributed computing?*

* *

*/Wednesday, December 7th, 2005/**//*

*/1:00pm/**//*

*/366 West Village H/*

*/Northeastern University/*

*/ /*

_Abstract_:

The talk will argue for a "grey-box" reduction notion in distributed 
computing, as an alternative to "black-box" reductions inherited from 
the classical theory of computing. The grey-box reduction classifies 
problems according to the amount of information about failures needed to 
solve them, and thus captures the main source of "hardness" in 
distributed systems. This notion will be illustrated through atomic 
object implementations with some rather surprising results. Joint work 
with C. Delporte and H. Fauconnier (Univ of Paris).

* *

* *

_Bio_:

Prior to becoming a professor at EPFL, Rachid Guerraoui worked at the 
centre de recherche de l'Ecole des Mines de Paris, the Commissariat à 
l'Energie Atomique in Saclay, and at HP Labs in Palo Alto. He worked 
first on distributed programming languages. The design and 
implementation of a distributed version of C++ was his PhD work (1992) 
from the University of Orsay. He currently works on distributed 
algorithms and programming languages and is on sabbatical at MIT.**

* *

* *

* *

Host: Karl Lieberherr

* *