Informatics Seminar on Monday, July 21st at 15.00 - Allen Clement

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Allen Clement

TITLE: BAR Fault Tolerance for Cooperative Systems

SPEAKER: Allen Clement, University of Texas at Austin

DATE: Monday, July 21st, 2008

PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)

TIME: 15.00

ABSTRACT:

Cooperative systems allow users to collectively perform tasks that are beyond any of their individual capabilities. Examples of these systems include p2p file sharing, Internet and wireless mesh routing, and cooperative backup. Designing and reasoning about cooperative systems can be especially difficult as, in addition to the potential for Byzantine failures inherent to any distributed system, each user participates in the system for selfish reasons and is willing to deviate from the specification for personal gain. We have introduced the BAR model for distributed systems in response to the challenges posed by systems in which both Byzantine and rational behaviors are a possibility. The BAR model is named after the three types of behaviors observed in cooperative systems: Byzantine, altruistic,

and rational. In this talk I define the BAR model for distributed

systems and describe our experience with the design of BAR-B, a BAR tolerant cooperative backup system.

BIO:

Allen Clement is a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Lorenzo Alvisi and Mike Dahlin. He holds a A.B (2000) in Computer Science from Princeton University. He is interested in distributed systems, fault tolerance, game theory, and ultimate frisbee.