Barbara
Liskov
MIT
From
Viewstamped
Replication
to
BFT
Abstract: In
the
1980s,
research
on
replication
protocols
was
concerned
primarily
with
systems
that
survived
crash
failures,
i.e.,
individual
replicas
could
fail
only
by
crashing.
The
talk
will
present
view
stamped
replication,
the
earliest
practical
replication
algorithm that
provided
the
ability
to
execute
general
operations
(as
opposed
to
just
reads
and
writes).
Vewstamped replication
is
similar
to
Paxos,
which
was
developed
slightly
later.
In the 1990s, researchers became interested in systems that could survive Byzantine failures, in which replicas fail arbitrarily. Replicated systems that survive Byzantine failures are substantially more complex, requiring both more replicas and more phases of communication, than those that survive only crash failures. The talk will present BFT, the first practical replication technique that handles Byzantine failures. BFT is a direct descendant of viewstamped replication. The talk will also discuss some new protocols intended to provide improved latency over viewstamped replication and BFT.
Biography: Professor Liskov is the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,and a fellow of ACM. She received the IEEE Von Neumann medal in 2004, the lifetime achievement award from the Society of Women Engineers in 1996, and in 2003 was named one of the 50 most important women in science by Discover Magazine.
Her research interests include distributed systems, replication algorithms to provide fault-tolerance, programming methodology, and programming languages, Her current research projects include Byzantine-fault-tolerant storage systems, peer-to-peer computing, and support for automatic deployment of software upgrades in large-scale distributed system.