September 22, 2024 September 22, 2024
While getting ready to teach my While getting ready to teach my grad distributed systems course this fallgrad distributed systems course this fall, I found myself once again flipping through Cheriton and Skeen’s , I found myself once again flipping through Cheriton and Skeen’s rather scathing 1993 article “Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication”rather scathing 1993 article “Understanding the limitations of causally and totally ordered communication”..
The short version of this post: The last-ever !!Con is coming up in a month from today! Please spread the word about !!Con and get your tickets here!
You may or may not already know about !!Con (pronounced “bang bang con”), the radically eclectic, radically affordable conference of ten-minute talks about the joy, excitement, and surprise of computing!
There’s a classic tradeoff between safety and liveness in the context of replicated data systems, originally proposed by Eric Brewer and later made precise by Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch. The idea is that, in a networked system of servers that is vulnerable to partitions (that is, where messages betweeen servers can be arbitrarily delayed,...
August 18, 2023 August 18, 2023 
My research group was busy this past year. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to in 2022-2023!
Back in spring 2020, I was wrapping up the distributed systems course I was teaching, and for the last lecture, decided to spend a little time poking at the question of who actually invented vector clocks. Most people who need something to cite for vector clocks cite Friedemann Mattern’s “Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems”,...
I’ve been getting underway with a new research project, and after seeing what Crista Lopes had to say recently about the potential of ChatGPT as a research tool, I decided to give it a shot. I found it a bit disappointing, for reasons that will be apparent shortly. Here’s the entire exchange I had with ChatGPT. Below, my prompts are in bold and...
January 18, 2023 January 18, 2023 Last AugustLast August, I wrote about a , I wrote about a classic protocol published by Raynal et al. in 1991classic protocol published by Raynal et al. in 1991 for ensuring that unicast messages in a distributed system are delivered in causal order. The Raynal... for ensuring that unicast messages in a distributed system are delivered in causal order. The Raynal...
This winter, I once again have the chance to offer a graduate seminar course on any topic I want. (Yay!) A couple months ago, I brainstormed a list of topics I liked and polled my grad students to see if there were any that particularly appealed to them. The results of the poll were, shall we say, indecisive: