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Tel-Aviv University - Computer Science Colloquium

Sunday, February 27, 14:15-15:15
COFFEE at 14:00

Schreiber Building, Room 309
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Paradigms for building distributed systems: scalable group communication and QoS preserving totally ordered multicast

Idit Keidar

MIT Lab for Computer Science

Abstract:

This talk presents two paradigms for building distributed
applications: (1) a new architecture for group communication services
and a scalable group membership service implemented within it; and (2)
a framework for totally ordered multicast that preserves Quality of
Service (QoS). Both paradigms are aimed at building large-scale
applications that require some level of consistency and also have
performance requirements, e.g., collaborative computing.

The new membership service was designed specifically for WANs; it is
not an extension of a LAN based service. The algorithm attains low
overhead by running in a single communication round on average.
Experimental results show that the membership service is scalable.
The service also supplies the hooks needed to provide clients with
full virtual synchrony semantics.

In the second part of the talk I will show that totally ordered
multicast can coexist with guaranteed predictable delays in certain
network models.  I will discuss two QoS reservation models: constant
bit rate (CBR) and variable bit rate (VBR).  For these models, I
present totally ordered multicast algorithms that preserve the
bandwidth and latency reserved by the application within certain
additive constants.  In particular, message loss, process failures and
dynamic joining of processes are tolerated while still preserving the
QoS guarantees.

The first part of the talk is based on joint work with Jeremy Sussman,
Keith Marzullo and Danny Dolev. The second part is joint work with
Ziv Bar-Joseph, Tal Anker and Nancy Lynch.
 

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For colloquium schedule, see http://www.math.tau.ac.il/~zwick/colloq.html