Consistent Distributed Storage (Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory)

Providing a shared memory abstraction in distributed systems is a powerful tool that can simplify the design and implementation of software systems for networked platforms. This enables the system designers to work with abstract readable and writable objects without the need to deal with the complexity and dynamism of the underlying platform. The key property of shared memory implementations is the consistency guarantee that it provides under concurrent access to the shared objects. The most intuitive memory consistency model is atomicity because of its equivalence with a memory system where accesses occur serially, one at a time. Emulations of shared atomic memory in distributed systems is an active area of research and development. The problem proves to be challenging, and especially so in distributed message passing settings with unreliable components, as is often the case in networked systems. We present several approaches to implementing shared memory services with the help of replication on top of message-passing distributed platforms subject to a variety of perturbations in the computing medium.

Vincent Gramoli is a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council at the University of Sydney, Australia and a Visiting Professor at EPFL, Switzerland. Vincent started his research on the topic of reconfigurable atomic memory while visiting the University of Connecticut and MIT (USA). He then worked in the area of large-scale distributed systems at INRIA (France) and on the slicing problem at Cornell University (USA). He moved to the University of Neuchâtel and EPFL (Switzerland), where he contributed to the development of the Transactional Memory stack. He obtained his Ph.D. from Université de Rennes and his Habilitation from Sorbonne University. His interest lies in the security and fault tolerance of distributed computing.