A selective and biased choice of techniques for building a distributed data store

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Paweł T. Wojciechowski, Poznan University of Technology
• Tuesday 14 May 2024, 12:00-13:00
• SS03, Computer Laboratory.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Jamie Vicary.

Single-machine data stores cannot support the scale and ubiquity of data today. The Internet applications and services must process a huge number of concurrent requests and events per second. So, they use distributed (or replicated) data stores which store and process data on multiple machines, offering key advantages in performance, scalability, and reliability. The purpose of the talk is to present a selective and biased choice of techniques and results which can be used for building an efficient distributed data store. Biased, because I only present solutions and results developed within a research project that I did with my PhD students. Selective, because an exhaustive description would be too exhausting to fit into a single talk. Therefore I will be discussing just the design of our novel database index for key-value data store systems, and only skim our other contributions that are directly related to distributed systems. The index, called Jiffy, has been designed with performance and scalability in mind. Therefore it has been designed as a lock-free concurrent data structure, which can dynamically adapt to the changing workload. It achieves superior performance despite built-in atomic operations (batch updates, snapshots, and range scans). During the talk I will be presenting Jiffy’s architecture, the algorithms for inserting and looking up the key-value pairs, and the operations used for resizing the data structure dynamically. The other contributions of our project include: efficient support for replica state recovery after failures, either by extending the classic Paxos consensus algorithm, or through the use of persistent memory, and a bit surprising theoretical results which are applicable to distributed data store systems that compromise consistency in favour of high availability and speed, but also support operations ensuring strong consistency (which requires consensus among replicas). (Based on a keynote talk at DEBS ‘23)

This talk is part of the Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory) series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge talks
• Computing and Mathematics
• Department of Computer Science and Technology talks and seminars
• Interested Talks
• Logic and Semantics Seminar (Computer Laboratory)
• SS03, Computer Laboratory
• School of Technology
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• tcw57’s list
• yk373's list

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.