Generation of Distributed Programming Environments

This technical report consists of three related papers in the area of distributed programming environments. Incremental Attribute Evaluation in Distributed Language-Based Environments presents algorithms that extend existing technology for the generation of single-user language-based editors from attribute grammars to the cases of multiple-user concurrent and distributed environments. Multi-User Distributed Language-Based Environment, an extended abstract, provides additional information on how to apply the algorithms. Reliability in Distributed Programming Environments presents additional algorithms that extend our results to unreliable networks

Scalable data management in distributed information systems

[EN] In the era of cloud computing and huge information systems, distributed applications should manage dynamic workloads; i.e., the amount of client requests per time unit may vary frequently and servers should rapidly adapt their computing efforts to those workloads. Cloud systems provide a solid basis for this kind of applications but most of the traditional relational database systems are unprepared to scale up with this kind of distributed systems. This paper surveys different techniques being used in modern SQL, NoSQL and NewSQL systems in order to increase the scalability and adaptability in the management of persistent data. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.This work has been supported by EU FEDER and Spanish MICINN under research grants TIN2009-14460-C03-01 and TIN2010-17193Pallardó Lozoya, MR.; Esparza Peidro, J.; García Escriva, JR.; Decker, H.; Muñoz Escoí, FD. (2011). Scalable data management in distributed information systems. 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Bull. 32, 36–43 (2009)DeCandia, G., Hastorun, D., Jampani, M., Kakulapati, G., Lakshman, A., Pilchin, A., Sivasubramanian, S., Vosshall, P., Vogels, W.: Dynamo: Amazon’s highly available key-value store. In: 21st ACM Symp. on Operat. Syst. Princ. (SOSP), Stevenson, Washington, USA, pp. 205–220 (2007)Stonebraker, M., Madden, S., Abadi, D.J., Harizopoulos, S., Hachem, N., Helland, P.: The end of an architectural era (it’s time for a complete rewrite). In: 33rd Intnl. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), pp. 1150–1160. ACM Press, Vienna (2007)Lomet, D.B., Fekete, A., Weikum, G., Zwilling, M.J.: Unbundling transaction services in the cloud. In: 4th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA (2009)Campbell, D.G., Kakivaya, G., Ellis, N.: Extreme scale with full SQL language support in Microsoft SQL Azure. In: Intnl. Conf. on Mngmnt. of Data (SIGMOD), pp. 1021–1024. 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Bull. 9, 4–9 (1986)Alonso, G., Kossmann, D., Roscoe, T.: SwissBox: An architecture for data processing appliances. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 32–37 (2011)Baker, J., Bond, C., Corbett, J.C., Furman, J.J., Khorlin, A., Larson, J., Léon, J.M., Li, Y., Lloyd, A., Yushprakh, V.: Megastore: Providing scalable, highly available storage for interactive services. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 223–234 (2011)Curino, C., Jones, E.P.C., Popa, R.A., Malviya, N., Wu, E., Madden, S., Balakrishnan, H., Zeldovich, N.: Relational cloud: A database-as-a-service for the cloud. In: 5th Biennial Conf. on Innov. Data Syst. Research (CIDR), Asilomar, CA, USA, pp. 235–240 (2011)Das, S., Agrawal, D., El Abbadi, A.: ElasTraS: An elastic transactional data store in the cloud. CoRR abs/1008.3751 (2010)Vogels, W.: Eventually consistent. Commun. 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Topics in Distributed Algorithms: On Wireless Networks, Distributed Storage and Streaming

Distributed algorithms are executed on a set of computational instances. Werefer to these instances as nodes. Nodes are runningconcurrently and are independent from each other. Furthermore, they have their own instructions and information. In this context, the challenges are to show thatthe algorithm is correct, regardless of computational, or communication delaysand to show bounds on the usage of communication.We are especially interested the behaviour after transient faults and underthe existence of Byzantine nodes.This thesis discusses fundamental communication models for distributed algorithms. These models are implementing abstract communication methods. First, we address medium access control for a wireless medium with guaranteeson the communication delay. We discuss time division multiple access(TDMA) protocols for ad-hoc networks and we introduce an algorithm that creates aTDMA schedule without using external references for localisation, or time. We justify our algorithm by experimental results.The second topic is the emulation of shared memory on message passingnetworks. Both, shared memory and message passing are basic interprocessorcommunication models for distributed algorithms. We are providing a way ofemulating shared memory on top of an existing message passing network underthe presence of data corruption and stop-failed nodes. Additionally, we ensurethe privacy of the data that is stored in the shared memory. The third topic looks into streaming algorithms and optimisation. We study the problem of sorting a stream ofvehicles on a highway with severallanes so that each vehicle reaches its target lane. We look into optimality interms of minimising the number of move operations, as well as, minimising the length of the output stream. We present an exact algorithm for the case oftwo lanes and show that NP-Hardness for a increasing number of lanes

Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community

The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In this collection, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond traditional classrooms and scholarly journals to share their work with the public. Here is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and to archive some of the important public-facing work feminists are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable. “In Public Feminisms, Baker and Dove-Viebahn have curated a vibrantly intersectional collection of essays that speak both to the longstanding commitment of feminisms to education and activism and the urgent need for this work in the contemporary moment. This book shows how scholar-activists are bringing together knowledge production and the sharing of that knowledge and community engagement through a series of compelling case studies. I can’t wait to teach it.” —Carol A. Stabile, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Baumann professor in American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Aviva Dove-Viebahn is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/textbooks/1004/thumbnail.jp

An Information-Theoretic Framework for Consistency Maintenance in Distributed Interactive Applications

Distributed Interactive Applications (DIAs) enable geographically dispersed users to interact with each other in a virtual environment. A key factor to the success of a DIA is the maintenance of a consistent view of the shared virtual world for all the participants. However, maintaining consistent states in DIAs is difficult under real networks. State changes communicated by messages over such networks suffer latency leading to inconsistency across the application. Predictive Contract Mechanisms (PCMs) combat this problem through reducing the number of messages transmitted in return for perceptually tolerable inconsistency. This thesis examines the operation of PCMs using concepts and methods derived from information theory. This information theory perspective results in a novel information model of PCMs that quantifies and analyzes the efficiency of such methods in communicating the reduced state information, and a new adaptive multiple-model-based framework for improving consistency in DIAs. The first part of this thesis introduces information measurements of user behavior in DIAs and formalizes the information model for PCM operation. In presenting the information model, the statistical dependence in the entity state, which makes using extrapolation models to predict future user behavior possible, is evaluated. The efficiency of a PCM to exploit such predictability to reduce the amount of network resources required to maintain consistency is also investigated. It is demonstrated that from the information theory perspective, PCMs can be interpreted as a form of information reduction and compression. The second part of this thesis proposes an Information-Based Dynamic Extrapolation Model for dynamically selecting between extrapolation algorithms based on information evaluation and inferred network conditions. This model adapts PCM configurations to both user behavior and network conditions, and makes the most information-efficient use of the available network resources. In doing so, it improves PCM performance and consistency in DIAs

SAGA: A project to automate the management of software production systems

The Software Automation, Generation and Administration (SAGA) project is investigating the design and construction of practical software engineering environments for developing and maintaining aerospace systems and applications software. The research includes the practical organization of the software lifecycle, configuration management, software requirements specifications, executable specifications, design methodologies, programming, verification, validation and testing, version control, maintenance, the reuse of software, software libraries, documentation, and automated management

Notes on Theory of Distributed Systems

Notes for the Yale course CPSC 465/565 Theory of Distributed Systems

Towards Sustainable Blockchains:Cryptocurrency Treasury and General Decision-making Systems with Provably Secure Delegable Blockchain-based Voting

The blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, its most prevalent application, continue to gain acceptance and wide traction in research and practice within academia and the industry because of its promise in decentralised and distributed computing. Notably, the meteoric rise in the value and number of cryptocurrencies since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009 have ushered in newer innovations and interventions that addressed some of the prominent issues that affect these platforms. Despite the increased privacy, security, scalability, and energy-saving capabilities of new consensus protocols in newer systems, the development and management of blockchains, mostly, do not reflect the decentralisation principle despite blockchains being decentralised and distributed in their architecture. The concept of treasury has been identified as a tool to address this problem. We explore the idea of blockchain treasury systems within literature and practice, especially with relation to funding and decision-making power towards blockchain development and maintenance. Consequently, we propose a taxonomy for treasury models within cryptocurrencies. Thereafter, we propose an efficient community-controlled and decentralised collaborative decision-making mechanism to support the development and management of blockchains. Our proposed system incentivises participants and is proven secure under the universally composable (UC) framework while also addressing gaps identified from our investigation of prior systems e.g. non-private ballots and insecure voting. Furthermore, we adapt our system and propose a privacy-preserving general decision making system for blockchain governance that supports privacy-centric cryptocurrencies. Besides, using a set of metrics, we introduce a consensus analysis mechanism to enhance the utility of decision-making of the systems by evaluating individual choices against collective (system-wide) decisions. Finally, we provide pilot system implementations with benchmark results confirming the efficiency and practicality of our constructions