October 13, 2011 - Wyatt Lloyd

Title: Don't Settle for Eventual: Scalable Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS

Abstract:
Geo-replicated, distributed data stores that support complex online applications, such as social networks, must provide an always-on experience where operations always complete with low latency. Today's systems often sacrifice strong consistency to achieve these goals, exposing inconsistencies to their clients and necessitating complex application logic. This talk will present the design and implementation of COPS, a key-value store that delivers causal consistency across the wide-area. A key contribution of COPS is its scalability, which can enforce causal dependencies between keys stored across an entire cluster, rather than a single server like in previous systems. The talk will also present COPS-GT, which adds get transactions that enable a client to obtain a consistent view of multiple keys without locking or blocking