DATE: Thursday, November 3, 2005
TIME: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
PLACE: Wean Hall 8220

SPEAKER:
Michael Merideth
CMU

TITLE:
Thema: Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Middleware for Web-Service Applications

ABSTRACT:
Distributed applications composed of collections of Web Services may call for diverse levels of reliability in different parts of the system.Byzantine fault tolerance is a general strategy that has recently been shown to be practical for the development of certain classes of survivable, client-server, distributed applications; however, little research has been done on incorporating it into selective parts of multi-tier, distributed applications like Web Services that have heterogeneous reliability requirements.

In this talk, I will present the design and evaluation of Thema, a new middleware system that extends Castro-Liskov BFT and Web Services technologies to provide a structured way to build multi-tier, Byzantine-fault-tolerant, survivable Web Services that application developers can use like other Web Services. I will also discuss some of the challenges involved in building multi-tier-capable BFT, including a potential deadlock scenario.

BIO:
Michael Merideth is a 4th year PhD student in the ISRI department of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Michael received an A.B., summa cum laude, fromBowdoin College, Maine, and an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon.He spent a year of his undergraduate studies at the University of Manchester, England, and worked fulltime inBoston and the Bay Area for three years before coming to Pittsburgh. Michael’s current research interests are in the area of reliable distributed systems.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/