ACID,
BASE, and the Rest
Mysore
Park Workshop,
Infosys
Campus, Mysore, India
Feb
16-19, 2011
Recent
technological trends, such as multi-core processors and cloud computing, have
pushed concurrent and distributed programming to the mainstream. However,
developing such programs that are both correct and performant remains a huge
challenge. Researchers and practitioners in the varied fields of databases,
cloud computing, parallel programming, concurrency, programming languages, and
verification have independently tackled this challenge focusing on unique
problems arising in their respective domains. We believe that there is
significant scope for synergy by bringing together researchers from these
diverse areas to build upon insights and techniques from each other. The main
goal of this workshop is to provide an opportunity for such a synergy and to
foster collaboration between the participants. Participation in the workshop is
by invitation only.
While the
workshop will be loosely organized to allow serendipitous and thought-provoking
discussion among the participants, the organizers would like to make
correctness a central theme of this workshop. Various correctness notions exist
in different domains that allow programmers to build performant systems. For
instance, apart from the standard ACID transactions, modern databases provide
different isolation levels, such as snapshot isolation, that provide weaker
guarantees while allowing transactions to execute faster. Similarly, cloud
applications require weaker consistency models, such as BASE, that favor
availability over the strong consistency of ACID semantics. On the other hand,
the composable nature of software applications has motivated linearizability as
a desirable correctness notion for concurrent components that allows
highly-optimized implementations that use low-level synchronizations while
providing a clean sequential contract at the interface. In this workshop, we
would like to explore the relationship between these different correctness
notions and investigate methods for specifying, verifying, and testing systems
against these notions.
Here are some
suggested topics that are of interest to this workshop:
·
Correctness
Criteria: What forms of consistency notions are
appropriate for the different class of concurrent and distributed applications?
What kinds of correctness properties do applications typically require? In
particular, what degree of isolation, consistency, and atomicity are suitable
from the perspective of applications?
·
Specification: How
do the applications specify the required correctness criteria?
·
Design
Patterns: What design patterns and idioms work well in
practice?
·
Systems: To
what degree can these properties be guaranteed by the platform (programming
language, libraries, and runtime system)? What are the performance tradeoffs
when one moves the responsibility for correctness between the platform and
application?
·
Verification:
How to build automatic verification and testing tools that
determine if applications ensure the desired specification
·
Synthesis: Can
program synthesis aid in achieving correct-by-construction applications?
The program is available here. The slides for all of the talks are also available as a zip file.
Most international visitors require a visa to
enter India. You should contact the Indian embassy in your country to obtain
more details. Here are the links to the visa issuing organizations for the
following countries: United States, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Israel. You
can obtain a sponsor letter required for the visa by contacting Rama.
For international visitors, the most convenient way to reach the workshop is to fly into Bangalore. For Indian participants limited travel support may be available on request. We will provide more details on traveling from Bangalore to Mysore very soon.
·
Madhavan Mukund, Chennai Mathematical Institute
·
Madan Musuvathi, Microsoft Research, Redmond
·
Ganesan Ramalingam, Microsoft Research, Bangalore
The
Mysore Park Workshop is a series of workshops that is inspired and modeled after
the Dagstuhl workshop series. It will be held
at the Infosys Mysore campus, located approximately 150km away from
Bangalore. These workshops are aimed at bringing together leading researchers
from across the world to stimulate collaborative research on cutting-edge
topics, particularly those of cross-disciplinary interest. There will be
particular emphasis on the overall quality of discussion. To keep quality
high, participation will be limited to experts from academia and industry. Workshops
will be encouraged to produce a report, which is an important way to summarize
actionable items (research challenges, resources, thesis topics) from the
discussion. A significant attempt will be made to disseminate the discussion
inside India by inviting PhD students, young researchers and practitioners.
These invitees can be young upcoming researchers who will be
"observers” for the meeting (and do not need to be established experts).
This
workshop is sponsored with the generous support of Mr. N R Narayanamurthy
(co-founder, Infosys). All local expenses of the participants, such as
accommodation and food expenses will be covered. The participants are
responsible for their travel to and from Mysore.