[Colloq] PhD Thesis Defense - Rui Wang, Monday, Aug. 14

[Rachel Kalweit]

College of Computer and Information Science
presents a PhD Thesis Defense by:
Rui Wang

Title:
Log-Based Recovery for Middleware Servers


Monday, August 14, 2006
3:00pm
366 West Village H

Abstract

The fact that computer system crashes cannot be completely prevented 
makes recovery an unavoidable choice for high availability. Among fault 
tolerant techniques, log-based recovery is relatively cheap yet provides 
effective recovery upon crashes. In this thesis we study log-based 
recovery for middleware servers such as Web services, which involve 
thread pooling, private in-memory states for clients, shared in-memory 
state, interactions among middleware servers and interactions with 
transactional systems such as DBMSs. This recovery guarantees the 
semantics of exactly-once execution upon crashes. Observing rareness of 
system crashes, relatively small size of shared state and infrequency of 
shared state read/write accesses, we reduce the logging overhead and 
keep recovery independence as much as possible. System interactions with 
transactional systems have low logging overhead and require little 
modification to existing transactional systems. Checkpointing has a very 
small impact on ongoing activities. Our recovery mechanism enables 
client private in-memory states to be recovered in parallel after a 
crash. We have implemented our recovery infrastructure prototype for Web 
services within the Microsoft ASP.NET framework. Our implementation 
demonstrates the manageability of system complexity and shows promising 
preliminary performance results.

Thesis Defense Committee:
	Prof. Betty Salzberg (Advisor, NEU)
	Dr. David Lomet (Microsoft Research)
	Prof. Donghui Zhang (NEU)
	Prof. Rajmohan Rajaraman (NEU)