RISE Seminar 9/21/18: Remote Memory for Non-Masochists, a talk by Marcos Aguilera

September 21, 2018

Title:                 Remote Memory for Non-Masochists

Speaker:           Marcos Aguilera

Affiliation:         VMWare Research

Date and location: Friday, September 21, 12:30 – 1:30 pm; Wozniak Lounge (430 Soda Hall)

Abstract:

Remote memory is an old idea that has recently re-emerged in the age of fast networks, and it is now increasingly compelling. However, for remote memory to be successful, it needs to provide a better abstraction. The current abstraction based on RDMA is complex, error-prone, and clunky, limiting its adoption to experts and masochists. In this talk, we describe a number of alternatives that we are exploring, which are simpler, more portable, and conceptually richer. These alternatives have deep implications to the design of new distributed algorithms and systems, as we demonstrate with several examples.

Bio:

Marcos K. Aguilera is a Senior Staff Researcher at VMware. Prior to that, he worked as a researcher at Compaq’s Systems Research Center, HP Labs, and Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. His research interests include the theoretical foundations of distributed computing and the practical applications of distributed systems. He has chaired SoCC 2016, OPODIS 2014, DISC 2012, ICDCN 2011, and LADIS 2010. He currently serves on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Computing Systems and on the program committees of ASPLOS 2019, DISC 2018, and OSDI 2018.