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.

Speaker Name/Affiliation: Edmund Nightingale/University of Michig

an

Date/Time: April 12 2007 11:00 a.m. - Noon

Coffee: 10:

45 a.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Host: Emmett Witchel

Ta

lk Title: Improving the Performance of Highly Reliable Software Systems

Talk Abstract:

Commodity operating systems still retain the des

ign principles developed when processor cycles were scarce and RAM was prec

ious.
These out-dated principles have led to performance/functionality

trade-offs that are no longer needed or required; I have found that far f

rom impeding performance features such as safety consistency and energy-ef

ficiency can often be added while improving performance over existing syste

ms.

I will describe my work developing Speculator which provides

facilities within the operating system kernel to track and propagate causal
dependencies. Using Speculator I will show that distributed and local fil

e systems can provide strong consistency and safety guarantees without the
poor performance these guarantees usually entail.