The TAU Programming Languages and Systems Seminar - Atomic Transaction Commit for Modern Data Stores

Abstract: 

Modern data stores often need to provide both high scalability and strong transactional semantics. They achieve scalability by partitioning data into shards and fault-tolerance by replicating each shard across several servers. A key component of such systems is the protocol for atomically committing a transaction spanning multiple shards, which is usually integrated with concurrency control. Unfortunately, the classical theory of atomic commit is too restrictive to capture the complexities of such protocols. I will present a new problem statement for atomic commit that more faithfully reflects modern requirements and will describe solutions to this problem in different classes of data stores, including those for geo-replication and those that exploit Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).

Short Bio: 

Alexey Gotsman is an Associate Research Professor at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid, Spain. He obtained his PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK. Alexey's interests are at the intersection of distributed systems and formal verification. He has received best paper awards at PODC, DISC and CONCUR and is currently a holder of an ERC Starting Grant.