It is a Leslie Lamport - the author of fundamental works in distributed computing, and you can also know him by the letters La in the word LaTeX - "Lamport TeX". It was he who for the first time, back in 1979, introduced the concept , and his article received the Dijkstra Award (more precisely, in 2000 the award was called in the old way: "PODC Influential Paper Award"). There is about him , where you can get some more interesting links. If you are excited about solving problems on happens-before or (BFT), they need to understand that Lamport is behind it all.
And he will soon come to our new conference on distributed computing - Hydra, which will be held July 11-12 in St. Petersburg. Let's see what kind of animal it is.
Hydra 2019
Topics like multithreading are some of the hottest topics at our conferences, always have been. It was just deserted in this hall, but then a person appears on the stage, talking about the memory model, happens-before or multi-threaded garbage collection and - boom! - already under a thousand people occupy all the available space to sit down and listen carefully. What is the essence of this success? Maybe the fact that we all have on our hands some kind of hardware capable of organizing distributed computing? Or is it that we subconsciously understand our inability to load it at its true worth? There is a real story of one St. Petersburg quantum (that is, a financial quantitative analyst and developer), who ended up with a computing cluster in his hands, the full power of which can only be used by him alone. And what would you do if you got to carry out your tasks with capacities many times greater than now?
Due to this popularity, the topic of performance and efficient computing tends to spread across the conference program. How many of the two days of reports can be made about performance - one third, two thirds? In some places there are artificial restrictions that limit this growth: in addition to performance, there must still be room for new web frameworks, for some kind of devops or architectural astronautics. No, performance, you won't eat us all whole!
Or you can go the opposite way, give up and honestly make a conference that will be entirely about distributed computing and only about them. And here it is, Hydra.
Let's honestly admit that today all computing is one way or another distributed. Whether it is a multi-core machine, a computing cluster, or a large-scale distributed service, there are many processes everywhere that perform independent calculations in parallel, synchronizing with each other. How it works in theory and how it works in practice will be the focus of Hydra.
Conference program
The program is currently under development. It should include reports from the founders of the theories of distributed systems and engineers working with them in production.
For example, we already know about the participation of Leslie Lamport from Microsoft Research and Maurice Herlihy from Brown University.
Maurice Herlihy - a very famous and respected professor of Computer Science, there is also a story about him , where you can go over the links and works. There you can notice as many as two Dijkstra awards, the first for work on , and the second, more recent - . By the way, the links do not even lead to SciHub, but to Brown University and Virginia Tech University, you can open and read.
Maurice is going to host a keynote called "Blockchains from a distributed computing perspective". If interested, you can take a look at the recording of Maurice's report from the St. Petersburg JUG. Evaluate how clearly and understandably he conveys the topic.
The second keynote called "Dual Data Structures" will read Michael Scott from the University of Rochester. And guess what - he has his own too . At home in Wisconsin, he is known for his work as dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in the world he is the man who, together with Doug Lea, developed those non-blocking algorithms and synchronous queues that Java libraries run on. He received his Dijkstra Prize three years after Herlihy, for his work "Algorithms for scalable synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors" (as expected, at the online library of the University of Rochester).
There is still a lot of time until mid-July. We will tell you about other speakers and their topics as we refine the program and approach July.
In general, the question arises - why do we make Hydra in the summer? After all, this is the off season, holidays. The problem is that there are university professors among the speakers, and any other time is busy for them. We just couldn't choose other dates.
Discussion zones
At other conferences, it happens that the speaker read what is necessary and immediately left. The participants do not even have time to look for it - after all, the next report begins almost without a gap. It hurts a lot, especially when important people like Lamport, Herlihy and Scott are present and you actually go to the conference just to meet them and talk about something.
We have solved this problem. Immediately after his report, the speaker goes to a special discussion area equipped with at least a whiteboard with a marker, and you have quite a lot of time. Formally, the speaker promises to be there at least during the break between reports. In reality, these discussion areas can stretch for hours on end (depending on the desire and endurance of the speaker).
As for Lamport, if I understand correctly, he wants to convince as many people as possible that - this is a good thing. (). Perhaps this will be a good chance for engineers to learn something new and useful. Leslie offers this option - whoever is interested can watch his past lectures and come with questions. That is, instead of a keynote, there can be, as it were, a specialized Q&A session, and then another discussion zone. I googled a bit and found a great one (officially dubbed ) and an hour lecture with Microsoft Faculty Summit.
If you thought of all these people as names cast in granite from Wikipedia and on book covers, it's time to meet them live! Chat and ask questions that the pages of scientific articles will not answer, but their authors will be happy to make contact.
Call for Papers
It is no secret that many of those who are now reading the article are not averse to telling something interesting enough themselves. From an engineering point of view, from a scientific point of view, from any point of view. Distributed computing is a very broad and deep topic, where there is a place for everyone.
If you want to play alongside Lamport, it's entirely possible. To become a speaker, you need , carefully read everything there and do it according to the instructions.
Be calm, as soon as you connect to the process, you will be helped. The program committee has sufficient resources to help with the report itself, its essence and design. The coordinator will help you deal with organizational issues and so on.
Pay special attention to the picture with the dates. July is a rather distant date for the participant, and the speaker needs to start acting now.
SPTDC school
The conference will be held on the same site with the SPTDC school, so for everyone who buys a ticket for the school, conference tickets - with a discount of 20%.
- a school that provides a wide range of courses on the practical and theoretical aspects of distributed systems, which are taught by recognized experts in the relevant field.
The school will be held in English, so here is the list of topics covered:
- Concurrent data structures: correctness and efficiency;
- Algorithms for non-volatile memory;
- Distributed Computability;
- distributed machine learning;
- State-machine replication and Paxos;
- Byzantine fault-tolerance;
- Algorithmic basics of blockchains.
The following speakers will be speaking:
- Leslie Lamport (Microsoft);
- Maurice Herlihy (Brown University);
- Michael Scott (University of Rochester);
- Dan Alistarh (IST Austria);
- Trevor Brown (University of Waterloo);
- Eli Gafni (UCLA);
- Danny Hendler (Ben Gurion University);
- Achour Mostefaoui (University of Nantes).
with the reports of the previous school can be freely viewed on YouTube:
Next Steps
The conference program is still being formed. Follow the news on HabrΓ© or in social networks (, , ).
If you really believe in the conference (or want to take advantage of the special starting price, as they say, "Early Bird") - you can go to the site and .
See you at Hydra!
Source: habr.com