Lorenzo Alvisi, Professor, the University of Texas at Austin
[Not recorded]
Abstract:
Since the elegant foundations of transaction processing were established in the mid 70’s with the notion of serializability and the codification of the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) paradigm, performance has not been considered one of ACID’s strong suits, especially for distributed data stores. Indeed,
the NoSQL/BASE movement of the last decade was born out of frustration with the limited scalability of traditional ACID solutions, only to become itself a source of frustration once the challenges of programming applications in this new paradigm began to sink in. But how fundamental is this dichotomy between performance and ease of programming? In this talk, I will share what my students and I have recently learned while trying to overcome the traditional terms of this classic tradeoff.
Bio:
Lorenzo Alvisi is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the The University of Texas at Austin, where he holds an Endowed Professorship in Computer Science. He is spending 2016-17 as a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. after earning a Laurea degree Summa Cum Laude in Physics from the University of Bologna, Italy. His research interests are in the theory and practice of distributed computing, with a particular focus on dependability. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of a Humboldt Research Award, an NSF Career Award, and several teaching awards. He serves on the editorial boards of ACM TOCS and Springer’s Distributed Computing and is a council member of the CRA’s Computing Community Consortium. In addition to distributed computing, he is passionate about western classical music and red Italian motorcycles.