[Colloq] Talk: Declarative Programming for Eventual Consistency - Suresh Jagannathan - Friday, November 13th, 10:30-11:30am, 366 WVH

[Walker, Lashauna]

Title: Declarative Programming for Eventual Consistency
Speaker: Suresh Jagannathan
Date: Friday, November 13th
Time: 10:30am-11:30am

Location: 366 WVH

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).



Thank You.

LaShauna Walker
Executive Assistant to Dean Carla Brodley
College of Computer and Information Science
Northeastern University
617-373-5204
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