SDI Seminar

Speaker: Peter Stout

Large-Scale Distributed Programming Without a Lot of Consistency

Date: February 24, 1994

Abstract: In this talk, I will describe Wax, a distributed computing system that allows programmers to exploit the computing power of hosts scattered throughout the Internet. The Wax programming, data, and failure models discourage reliance on data consistency, which is difficult to implement and costly to use in a wide-are network, where communication latency and processor and network failure rates are high. By deemphasizing consistency, Wax provides programmers with greater potential parallelism and a task management facility that frees the programmer from concerns about process scheduling and monitoring. And for many applications this is a big win.