Title :
P2: Declarative Networking
Speaker :
Timothy Roscoe
Intel Research Berkely Principal Researcher
Time & Place :
August 28, 2006 (14:00 – 15:30)
Building 301, Room 520, Seoul National University
Abstract:
Correctly implementing distributed algorithms (for example, overlay routing or group consensus) is famously difficult. Both thread-based and event-driven models for distributed systems result in code which is error-prone and hard to understand for both programmers and automated tools. In this talk I will present P2, a system developed by my group at Intel Research Berkeley in collaboration with U.C. Berkeley, which explores a different approach to programming distributed systems: specifying distributed algorithms as continuous distributed relational queries. P2 allows distributed systems to be written compactly in a declarative logic language, which is compiled to a dataflow graph and executed directly. Conciseness is a major benefit: the complete lookup and maintenance algorithms for the Chord overlay network require only 47short rules. I’ll describe the P2 approach, how the implementation works, and discuss assorted issues arising within the project including query semantics, evaluation strategies, P2’s transport stack, and the use of reflection for query-based distributed debugging.
Bio:
Timothy Roscoe received a PhD from the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, where he was a principal designer and builder of the Nemesis operating system, as well as working on the Wanda micro kernel and Pandora multimedia system. After three years working on web-based collaboration systems at an Internet startup company in North Carolina, Mothy joined Sprint’s Advanced Technology Lab in Burlingame, California, as a researcher, where he worked on application hosting platforms, networking monitoring, and assorted systems management and security problems. Mothy joined Intel Research at Berkeley in April 2002, and has been a principal architect of Planet Lab, an open, shared platform for developing and deploying planetary-scale services. His current research interests include distributed query processing and its relationship to network routing; network architecture; and high-performance operating systems. In January 2007 he will take up a position as professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.