Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Fall 2005

What is "hard" in distributed computing?

Speaker: Rachid Guerraoui (EPFL/MIT)

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2005

Talk: 12:00 pm, 366 WVH

Abstract

The talk will argue for a "grey-box" reduction notion in distributed computing, as an alternative to "black-box" reductions inherited from the classical theory of computing. The grey-box reduction classifies problems according to the amount of information about failures needed to solve them, and thus captures the main source of "hardness" in distributed systems. This notion will be illustrated through atomic object implementations with some rather surprising results. Joint work with C. Delporte and H. Fauconnier (Univ of Paris).

Biography

Prior to becoming a professor at EPFL, Rachid Guerraoui worked at the centre de recherche de l'Ecole des Mines de Paris, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique in Saclay, and at HP Labs in Palo Alto. He worked first on distributed programming languages. The design and implementation of a distributed version of C++ was his PhD work (1992) from the University of Orsay. He currently works on distributed algorithms and programming languages and is on sabbatical at MIT.