Distributed Consensus: Making Impossible Possible
Distributed Consensus: Making Impossible Possible
In this talk, we explore how to construct resilient distributed systems on top of unreliable components.
Starting, almost two decades ago, with Leslie Lamport’s work on organising parliament for a Greek island. We will take a journey to today’s datacenters and the systems powering companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Along the way, we will face interesting impossibility results, machines acting maliciously and the complexity of today’s networks.
Ultimately, we will discover how to reach agreement between many parties and from this, how to construct new fault-tolerance systems that we can depend upon everyday.
Talk objectives:
- To learn how to build more reliable distributed systems
Target audience:
- Developers of distributed systems
About Heidi
Heidi Howard is currently studying towards PhD at the Cambridge University, Computer Lab, under the supervision of Prof. Jon Crowcroft. Her research interest is fault-tolerance, consistency and consensus in modern distributed systems. In 2014, she received her BA in Computer Science from Pembroke College at the Cambridge University. Heidi has also previously worked as research assistant and undergraduate researcher on topics such as middlebox traversal, DNS, privacy preserving systems and wireless community networks.
Github: heidi-ann
Twitter: @heidiann360