SDI

CONTACT

• Karen Lindenfelser

ON THE SDI PAGES

• About the Seminars
• Times/Locations & Contacts
• Info for Speakers
• Schedule
• Abstract Archive

INTEL RESEARCH SEMINAR

DATE: Thursday , March 7, 2002
TIME: Noon - 1:30 pm
PLACE: Intel Seminar (417 S. Craig Street - 3rd Floor)
INTEL EVENTS PAGE: http://www.intel-research.net/pittsburgh/events.htm

SPEAKER:
Thomas Bressoud
Bell Laboratories

TITLE:
Fault-Tolerant TCP: Wrapping Server-Side TCP to Mask Connection Failures

ABSTRACT:
Work in providing fault-tolerance, wherein a computation may continue in the presence of faults, has focused on application-level solutions and middleware incorporating custom protocols as the basis for replica communication. While appropriate for building new services designed from the start with fault-tolerance objectives, these techniques are inadequate when applied to existing service applications and/or higher level protocols designed on top of single-endpoint connection oriented communication protocols such as TCP. With the ubiquitousness of TCP, this becomes a significant problem in retrofitting fault tolerance for many of today's services.

In this talk, I will present an implementation of a fault-tolerant TCP (FT-TCP) that allows a faulty server to keep its TCP connections open until it either recovers or is failed over to a backup. The failure and recovery of the server process are completely transparent to client processes connected with it via TCP. FT-TCP does not affect the software running on a client, does not require changes to the server's TCP implementation, and does not use a proxy.

BIO:
Thomas Bressoud grew up in Springfield, Ohio and received his B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Muskingum College in 1983. This was followed by a seven year tenure at MIT Lincoln Laboratory working in real-time radar systems. Tom received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University in May 1996 under the supervision of Fred Schneider. From August 1994 to the present, Tom has been employed by Isis Distributed Systems, Stratus Computer, Ascend Communications, and Lucent Technologies. The interesting twist is that the series of company changes all occurred through corporate
acquisitions (not job-hopping). In a search for stability and an ability to pursue more focused research, Tom joined Bell Labs in January 2000.

For Further Seminar Info:
Contact Kim Kaan, 412-605-1203, or visit http://www.intel-research.net.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/