Andrew Myers
Cornell University, USA
Abstract
Programming concurrent, distributed systems that mutate shared, persistent, geo-replicated state is hard. To enable high availability and scalability, a new class of weakly consistent data stores has become popular. However, some data needs strong consistency. We introduce mixed-consistency transactions, embodied in a new embedded language, MixT. Programmers explicitly associate consistency models with remote storage sites; within each atomic, isolated transaction, data can be accessed with a mixture of different consistency models.
Compile-time information-flow checking, applied to consistency models, ensures that these models are mixed safely and enables the compiler to automatically partition transactions into a single sub-transaction per consistency model. New run-time mechanisms ensure that consistency models can also be mixed safely, even when the data used by a transaction resides on separate, mutually unaware stores. Performance measurements show that despite offering strong guarantees, mixed-consistency transactions can significantly outperform traditional serializable transactions.
Bio
Andrew Myers is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 1999, advised by Barbara Liskov.
His research interests include computer security, programming languages, and distributed and persistent programming systems. His work on computer security has focused on practical, sound, expressive languages and systems for enforcing information security. The Jif programming language makes it possible to write programs which the compiler ensures are secure, and the Fabric system extends this approach to distributed programming. The Polyglot extensible compiler framework has been widely used for programming language research.
Myers is an ACM Fellow. He has received awards for papers appearing in POPL’99, SOSP’01, SOSP’07, CIDR’13, PLDI’13, and PLDI’15.
Myers is the current Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) and past co-EiC for the Journal of Computer Security. He has also served as program chair or co-chair for a few conferences: ACM POPL 2018, ACM CCS 2016, POST 2014, IEEE CSF 2010, and IEEE S&P 2009.
Host
Rodrigo Seromenho Miragaia Rodrigues
Venue:
Anfiteatro VA4 no piso-1 do Edificio de Civil – IST/Alameda