Wednesday, Dec 14

Democratizing Transactional Programming

Vincent Gramoli and Rachid Gerraoui

Abstract

The transaction abstraction is arguably one of the most appealing middleware paradigms. It lies typically between the programmer of a concurrent or distributed application on the one hand, and the operating system with the underlying network on the other hand. It encapsulates the complex internals of failure recovery and concurrency control, significantly simplifying thereby the life of a non-expert programmer. Yet, some programmers are indeed experts and, for those, the transaction abstraction turns out to be inherently restrictive in its classic form. We argue for a genuine democratization of the paradigm, with different transactional semantics to be used by different programmers and composed within the same application.

Slides: http://2011.middleware-conference.org/presentations/KeynoteRachid/

Thursday, Dec 15

DHTs ten years after: Game changer or red herring?

Peter Druschel and Ant Rowstron

Abstract

At Middleware 2001, we published a paper on what has since become known as a DHT or structured overlay. It was one of four such systems published that year, and contributed to a flurry of research on p2p systems over the following ten years. In this talk, we take a technical retrospective on that work and also reflect on what we thought were the strength and weaknesses, applications, broader impacts, and challenges of the technology at the time of publication, versus how things actually turned out.