School of Computer and Cyber Sciences dean publishes distributed computing storage book

School of Computer and Cyber Sciences Dean, Dr. Alex Schwarzmann, in collaboration with two other authors, published a new book last month called “Consistent Distributed Storage.”

The book presents several key approaches to implementing shared memory services for networked systems. Providing a shared memory abstraction in distributed systems is a powerful tool that can simplify the design and implementation of software systems for networked platforms. This enables the system designers to work with abstract readable and writable objects without the need to deal with the complexity and dynamism of the underlying platform.

The key property of shared memory implementations is the consistency guarantee that it provides under concurrent access to the shared objects. The most intuitive memory consistency model is called “atomicity,” and it provides an illusion of a memory system where accesses occur serially, one at a time. Emulations of shared atomic memory in distributed systems is an active area of research and development. The problem proves to be challenging, and especially so in distributed message passing settings with unreliable components and run-time failures, as is often the case in networked systems. The material in the book includes the research results of Schwarzmann and his coauthors, as well as other leading researchers in this field.

“This new book presents the most important algorithms for and approaches to developing consistent and fault-tolerant distributed memory services,” said Schwarzmann. “The monograph is designed to be pedagogical, and it is very suitable as a supplementary textbook for a graduate-level course on distributed computing.”

The book is co-authored with Vincent Gramoli, University of Sydney, Australia and EPFL, Switzerland, and Nicolas Nicolaou, Algolysis Ltd. Cyprus. It is published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers in the Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory.