DATE: Thursday, September 25, 2003
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Wean Hall 8220

SPEAKER:
Garth Goodson
Carnegie Mellon University

TITLE:
Efficient, Flexible Consistency for Highly Fault-tolerant Storage

ABSTRACT:
Fault-tolerant storage systems spread data redundantly across a set of storage-nodes in an effort to preserve and provide access to data despite failures. One difficulty created by this architecture is the need for a consistent view, across storage-nodes, of the most recent update. Such consistency is made difficult by concurrent updates, partial updates made by clients that fail, and failures of storage-nodes.

This talk will describe the design and implementation of a family of strong consistency protocols for survivable, decentralized data storage. These protocols exploit storage-node versioning to efficiently achieve strong consistency semantics, and erasure-coded data for network and storage efficiency. The protocol family is made scalable by offloading work from the storage-nodes to the clients. The protocol family is flexible in that it covers a broad range of fault and timing assumptions, up to asynchrony and Byzantine faults of both storage-nodes and clients, with no changes to the client-server interface, server implementation, or system structure. Each protocol scales with its requirements -- it only does work necessitated by the system and fault models.

BIO:
Garth Goodson is a 6th year Ph.D. student in the Parallel Data Lab who has been working on consistency protocols for decentralized storage for the past year and a half. He hopes to be able to complete his Ph.D. within the next year. Before storage protocols he worked on the Self-Securing Storage System (S4) project, and has built numerous RPC packages.

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