Seminar/2013-04-24

Mercredi 24 avril 2013, 11-12h, Salle L-Alpha du LRDE

Designing robust distributed systems with weakly interacting feedback structures

Documents

van-roy.pdf

Peter Van Roy, Université catholique de Louvain

Large distributed systems on the Internet are subject to hostile environmental conditions such as node failures, erratic communications, and partitioning, and global problems such as hotspots, attacks, multicast storms, chaotic behavior, and cascading failures. How can we build these systems to function in predictable fashion in such situations as well as being easy to understand and maintain? In our work on building self-managing systems in the SELFMAN project, we have discovered a useful design pattern for building complex systems, namely as a set of Weakly Interacting Feedback Structures (WIFS). A feedback structure consists of a graph of interacting feedback loops that together maintain one global system property. We give examples of biological and computing systems that use WIFS, such as the human respiratory system and the TCP family of network protocols. We then show the usefulness of the design pattern by applying it to the Scalaris key/value store from SELFMAN. Scalaris is based on a structured peer-to-peer network with extensions for data replication and transactions. Scalaris achieves high performance: from 4000 to 14000 read-modify-write transactions per second on a cluster with 1 to 15 nodes each containing two dual-core Intel Xeon processors at 2.66 GHz. Scalaris is a self-managing system that consists of five WIFS, for connectivity, routing, load balancing, replication, and transactions. We conclude by explaining why WIFS are an important design pattern for building complex systems and we outline how to extend the WIFS approach to allow proving global properties of these systems.

Peter Van Roy is coauthor of the classic programming textbook "Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming" and professor at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium. His group hosts the Mozart Programming System (see www.mozart-oz.org), with which he explores the relationship between programming languages and distributed programming. He wrote the Aquarius Prolog compiler, the first to generate code competitive in performance with C compilers. He received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley and a French "Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches" from the Université Paris Diderot.

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/WIFSpaper.pdf, http://pldc.info.ucl.ac.be, http://www.mozart-oz.org, http://www.ist-selfman.org