Paxos unpacked

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I am looking for PhD students to work with me on my project "Paxos Unpacked". I am attaching a short abstract below. The work done here is very useful for distributed databases and cloud computing systems.

So if you are interested in a distributed systems PhD, or you know someone interested in a distributed systems PhD, please let me know by emailing me with a short CV and qualifications. 

I will have research assistantship funding available for qualifying applicants after they get accepted to the PhD program at University at Buffalo, SUNY.


Paxos Unpacked

Due to their excellent fault-tolerance properties, Paxos protocols have been employed by many cloud computing systems for consistent coordination of clusters of computers. This project aims to show that when properly customized, Paxos family of protocols can also deliver top-notch performance and scalability, which they currently lack. To this end, the project will design high-performance, scalable, practical, and usable Paxos variants customized for different deployments and use cases. Instead of developing disjoint point-solutions, the project will provide a systematic and principled exploration of the solution space.

Scaling Paxos and making it practical and customizable involves many challenges and requires an assortment of distributed algorithmic tools and techniques. For scaling Paxos horizontally, the project will investigate novel in-protocol sharding and reconfiguration strategies enabled by the flexible quorums result. For scaling Paxos vertically, the project will alleviate the bottleneck at the leaders by decoupling control from communication flow and by employing in-protocol aggregation optimizations. To provide consensus as a lightweight serverless primitive, the project will develop efficient single-instance fine-granularity consensus as a systems primitive and showcase its use in applications.

The techniques developed in this project will have broader applicability to coordination protocols in general. In order to accelerate technology transfer to academia and industry, the project will showcase these techniques in the context of a globally distributed database prototype. The project will also enable broader impact through enhancing scientific/technological understanding, distributing tools and software to the community, engaging undergraduate and underrepresented students, and reaching out to K-12 students. New tools, software, and material will be created to teach students the principles of distributed systems and reasoning about distributed protocols.

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