Some Sample Distributed Systems Problems And Algorithms

  • Kaushik Rajan | Microsoft Research India

In this talk I will introduce some traditional problems in distributed systems and describe simple algorithms to solve them. The focus will mostly be on asynchronous messaging passing algorithms, however we will look at some asynchronous shared memory and synchronous message passing algorithms as well. The first half of the talk will introduce problems that arise due to the asynchronous nature of distributed systems. We will look at 3 major topics in this section; (1) time and event ordering, (2) mutual exclusion, (3) global consistent snapshots. The second half we will look at additional problems that arise due to failure of components. Once again we will look at 3 major topics (1) consensus, (2) leader election, (3) fault tolerance via replication.

Speaker Details

I am a member of the Rigorous Software Engineering group at Microsoft Research India. I am broadly interested in the areas of computer architecture, static analysis and programming languages. My current research focus is on providing language support for programming multi-cores and distributed systems.

I completed my PhD from the Indian Institute of Science where I worked with Prof R. Govindarajan.

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