Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 Projects

Collaborations in European Programs, except FP7

Google European Doctoral Fellowship “A principled approach to eventual consistency based on CRDTs

Cloud computing systems suffer from a fundamental tension between scalability and data consistency. Avoiding the synchronisation bottleneck requires highly skilled programmers, makes applications complex and brittle, and is error-prone. The Commutative Replicated Data Type (CRDT) approach, based on commutativity, is a simple and principled solution to this conundrum; however, only a handful of CRDTs are known, and CRDTs are not a universal solution. This PhD research aims to expand our knowledge of CRDTs, to design and implement a re-usable library of composable CRDTs, to maintain study techniques for maintaining strong invariants above CRDTs, and to experiment with CRDTs in applications. We are hopeful that significant distributed applications can be designed using our techniques, which would radically simplify the design of cloud software, reconciling scalability and consistency. This Google European Doctoral Fellowship is awarded to Marek Zawirski, advised by Marc Shapiro. This award includes a grant of 41 000 euros yearly over three years starting September 2010.