Seminar By Samuel Benz from VeriSign (.COM/.NET)
Internet-scale services rely on data partitioning and replication to provide scalable performance and high availability. Moreover, to reduce user-perceived response times and tolerate disasters (i.e., the failure of a whole datacenter), services are increasingly becoming geographically distributed. Data partitioning and replication, combined with local and geographical distribution, introduce daunting challenges, including the need to carefully order requests among replicas and partitions. One way to tackle this problem is to use group communication primitives that encapsulate order requirements.
While replication is a common technique used to design such reliable distributed systems, to cope with the requirements of modern cloud based “always-on” applications, replication protocols must additionally allow for throughput scalability and dynamic reconfiguration, that is, on-demand replacement or provisioning of system resources. We propose a dynamic atomic multicast protocol which fulfills these requirements. It allows to dynamically add and remove resources to an online replicated state machine and to recover crashed processes.
Bio
Samuel Benz worked during his PhD together with Prof. Fernando Pedone on distributed systems, particularly on atomic multicast algorithms. He received his B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from FHZH (2003), his M.S. and PhD in Computer Science from USI (2013, 2018). In between he worked several years in industry, e.g., for SWITCH (.CH/LI). Samuel is currently working as a software engineer at VeriSign (.COM/.NET) in Fribourg.