Towards the dependable cloud: Building the foundations for tomorrow's dependable cloud computing infrastructures

ERC Starting Grant No. 307732. Acronym: DependableCloud. Host Institution: INESC-ID. (Previous HI: FCT/Nova U. Lisbon)

Cloud computing is a fast growing computational model where companies and individuals are able to outsource part of their computational or IT needs to a cloud provider, and access the data or results of their computations as services over the Internet. To support these cloud services, cloud providers are now deploying and managing an infrastructure formed by several data centers spread across the globe, each comprising tens or even hundreds of thousands of machines. This project tackles two important problems that arise from the distinctive characteristics of the infrastructure that supports cloud services. The first is the tension between consistency and performance in geo-replicated systems, where the need to provide fast responses to the users of cloud services is at odds with providing strong consistency guarantees that ensure intuitive semantics and enforce important application invariants. The second is to find principled ways to address non-crash but non-malicious faults, which, while uncommon in conventional standalone or distributed systems, surface inevitably at the scale of a data center.

Post-docs. In the context of this ERC grant, we have an open prospective postdoctoral researcher position in distributed systems, with a particular focus on combining strong and weak consistency in a principled way. We are looking for candidates with the ambition to conduct top-notch research and publish in the most competitive venues of our field. Furthermore, candidates should have both the ability to build large-scale systems that can be adopted in practice, and also a strong background on the foundations of distributed computing.

If you are interested, please send email to the PI, and attach the following materials: (1) your cv, (2) a research statement, and (3) the contact information of two or more individuals who have agreed to write letters of reference.

To attract the strongest possible candidates, the prospective position offers a competitive salary.

The prospective position will remain open until the right candidate is found, so please submit your application as soon as possible.

Doctoral students. We are searching for highly motivated PhD students who have the ambition to conduct top-notch research and publish in the most competitive venues in our field. There are several doctoral programs where you can apply in the context of this project, with different deadlines throuhgout the year. Please contact the PI for more information.

PI:

• Rodrigo Rodrigues

  Post-docs:

• Ricardo Dias
• Kostas Kloudas

  PhD Students (some students are supported by the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems):

• Nancy Estrada
• Daniel Porto
• Filipe Freitas
• Pedro Fonseca
• Cheng Li

  Alumni:

• Pramod Bhatotia (PhD student, now group leader at TU Dresden).
• Joao Leitao (post-doc, now at NOVA Univ. Lisbon).
• Henrique Moniz (post-doc, now at Google in NYC).
• Nuno Santos (PhD student, now an assistant professor at IST - Univ. Lisbon)

• IncApprox: A Data Analytics System for Incremental Approximate Computing

In Proc. 25th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2016).
Dhanya R Krishnan, Do Le Quoc, Pramod Bhatotia, Christof Fetzer, and Rodrigo Rodrigues
• Characterizing the Consistency of Online Services

In the 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks - DSN 2016 (Practical Experience Reports)
Filipe Freitas, Joo Leitao, Nuno Preguiça, Rodrigo Rodrigues
• Pixida: Optimizing Data Parallel Jobs in Wide-Area Data Analytics

In PVLDB - Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. Volume 9, No. 2, October 2015. The 42nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, New Delhi, India.
Konstantinos Kloudas, Margarida Mamede, Nuno Preguiça, Rodrigo Rodrigues.
• Extending Eventually Consistent Cloud Databases for Enforcing Numeric Invariants

In Proceedings of the IEEE 34th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2015).
Valter Balegas, Diogo Serra, Sergio Duarte, Carla Ferreira, Marc Shapiro, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Nuno Preguiça.
• Visigoth Fault Tolerance

In Proceedings of the Tenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2015). Daniel Porto, Joao Leitao, Cheng Li, Allen Clement, Aniket Kate, Flavio Junqueira, Rodrigo Rodrigues.
• Putting Consistency back into Eventual Consistency

In Proceedings of the Tenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2015). Valter Balegas, Sergio Duarte, Carla Ferreira, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Nuno Preguica, Mahsa Najafzadeh and Marc Shapiro.
• Guardat: Enforcing data policies at the storage layer

In Proceedings of the Tenth European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2015). Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Eslam Elnikety, Aastha Mehta, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Johannes Gehrke and Ansley Post.
• iThreads: A Threading Library for Parallel Incremental Computation

In the 20th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2015). Pramod Bhatotia, Umut Acar, Bjoern Brandenburg, and Rodrigo Rodrigues.
• Towards Fast Invariant Preservation in Geo-replicated Systems

SIGOPS Operating Systems Review , Volume 49 Issue 1. Valter Balegas, Sergio Duarte, Carla Ferreira, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Nuno Preguiça, Mahsa Najafzadeh, Marc Shapiro.
• SKI: Exposing Kernel Concurrency Bugs through Systematic Schedule Exploration

In Proc. of the 11th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2014). Pedro Fonseca, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Bjoern Brandenburg.
• Slider: Incremental Sliding Window Analytics

In Proc. of the 15th Annual ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware conference (Middleware 2014). Pramod Bhatotia, Umut Acar, Flavio Junqueira, and Rodrigo Rodrigues.
• Automating the Choice of Consistency Levels in Replicated Systems

In the 2014 Usenix Annual Technical Conference (Usenix ATC '14). Cheng Li, Joao Leitao, Allen Clement, Nuno Preguica, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Viktor Vafeiadis.
• Enhancing the OS Against Security Threats in System Administration

In the 13th ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Middleware Conference (Middleware'12). Nuno Santos, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Bryan Ford.
• Making Geo-Replicated Systems Fast as Possible, Consistent when Necessary

In the 10th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '12). Cheng Li, Daniel Porto, Allen Clement, Johannes Gehrke, Nuno Preguica, and Rodrigo Rodrigues.

PI's email can be found here