Where: Outhouse Pub @ 7pm

Who: Miles Gould

Title: CRDTs and LVars

Abstract

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The CAP theorem for distributed databases ("consistent, available,

partition-tolerant: pick two") and the growth of Big Data have led to a

renewed interest in relaxed standards of consistency for distributed

data. For many applications it's enough to guarantee eventual

consistency between nodes, but designing protocols to ensure this has

proved tricky and error-prone. A neat approach is to build eventual

consistency guarantees into the datatypes themselves using ideas from

the theory of semilattices: this leads to so-called Convergent

Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). These turn out to be closely related to

the notion of LVars, studied by Kuper et al in the context of concurrent

shared-memory Haskell programs.