This is Leslie Lamport - the author of the basic works in distributed computing, and you can also know him by the letters La in the word La TeX - "Lamport TeX". It was he who, for the first time, in 1979, introduced the concept of sequential consistency , and his article “How to Make Multiprocess Programs” won the Dijkstra Prize (more precisely, in 2000 the prize was called as before: “PODC Influential Paper Award "). About him there is an article in Wikipedia , where you can get some more interesting links. If you are delighted with the solution of problems for what happens before or the problems of Byzantine generals (BFT), then you should understand that Lamport is behind all this.

And he will soon arrive at our new conference on distributed computing - Hydra, which will be held July 11-12 in St. Petersburg. Let's see what this beast is.

Hydra 2019

Topics like multithreading are among the most popular at our conferences, they have always been like that. It was just now deserted in this room, but a man appears on the scene telling about the memory model, it happens-before or multithreaded garbage collection and - boom! - already under a thousand people occupy all available space to sit down and listen carefully. What is the essence of this success? Maybe the fact that we all have on hand some kind of iron that can organize distributed computing? Or is it that we unconsciously understand our inability to load it in its true worth? There is a real story of one St. Petersburg quantum (that is, a financial quantitative analyst and developer) who has a computing cluster in his hands, the full power of which can be used only by him alone. And what would you do if you get power to fulfill your tasks many times more than they do now?

Due to such popularity, the topic of productivity and effective calculations tends to spread through the conference program. How many of the two days of reports can be done about the performance - a third, two-thirds? In some places there are artificial restrictions that limit this growth: in addition to performance, there must be a place for new web frameworks, for some devops or architectural astronautics. No, performance, you do not eat us all entirely!

And you can go the opposite way, to give up and honestly make a conference that will be entirely about distributed computing and only about them. And here it is, Hydra.

Let's honestly admit that today all calculations are somehow distributed. Whether it is a multi-core machine, a computing cluster, or a large-scale distributed service, there are many processes everywhere that perform independent computations in parallel, synchronizing with each other. How it works in theory and works in practice will be devoted to Hydra.

Conference program

The program is currently in the formative stage. It should include reports from the founders of the theories of distributed systems and the engineers who work with them on the prod.

For example, the participation of Leslie Lamport from Microsoft Research and Maurice Hurliha from Brown University is already known.

Maurice Hurlihi is a very well-known and respected Computer Science professor, there is also a page on Wikipedia about him where you can go over links and works. There you can see as many as two Dijkstra awards, the first for work on “Wait-Free Synchronization” , and the second, more recent, “Transactional Memory: Architectural Support for the Lock-Free Data Structures” . By the way, links do not even lead to SciHub, but to Brown University and Virginia Tech University, you can open and read.

Maurice is going to hold a keyout called the Blockchains from a distributed computing perspective. If interested, you can take a look at the recording of the report of Maurice from the St. Petersburg JUG. Rate how clearly and clearly he conveys the topic.

The second keyout called Dual Data Structures will be read by Michael Scott from the University of Rochester. And guess what - he also has his own page on Wikipedia . In Wisconsin, he is known for his work as a dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in the world he is a person who, together with Doug Lea, developed those non-blocking algorithms and synchronous queues that run Java libraries. He received his Dijkstra Prize three years after Herlih, for his work “Algorithms for scalable synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors” (as it should be, it lies openly in the online library of the University of Rochester).

Until mid-July, a lot of time. We will talk about the rest of the speakers and their topics as the program is refined and closer to July.

In general, the question arises - why do we do the Hydra in the summer? After all, this is the dead season, holidays. The problem is that among the speakers there are university teachers, and any other time they are busy. We just could not choose other dates.

Discussion areas

At other conferences, it so happens that the speaker read what is needed and immediately left. Participants do not even have time to look for him - after all, the next report begins almost without a gap. It is very painful, especially if there are such important people as Lamport, Hurliha and Scott, and you actually go to the conference, only to meet with them and discuss something.

We have solved this problem. Immediately after his report, the speaker goes to a special discussion area, equipped at least with a whiteboard with a marker, and you have a fairly large amount of time. Formally, the speaker promises to be there at least the whole time between reports. In reality, these discussion zones can stretch for hours on end (depending on the desire and endurance of the speaker).

As for Lamport, if I understood correctly, he wants as many people as possible to convince that TLA + is a good thing. ( TLA + article on Wikipedia ). Perhaps this will be a good chance for engineers to learn something new and useful. Leslie offers this option - who cares, can look at his previous lectures and come up with questions. That is, instead of a keyout there can be, as it were, a specialized Q & A session, and then also a discussion zone. I went a little googling and found a great TLA + course (officially dubbed by the playlist on YouTube ) and an hour-long lecture entitled “Thinking Above the Code” with the Microsoft Faculty Summit.

If you perceived all these people as cast in granite names from Wikipedia and on the covers of books - it's time to meet them live! To talk and ask questions that the pages of scientific articles will not answer, but their authors will be happy to contact.

Call for Papers

It is no secret that many of those who are now reading the article themselves do not mind telling something interesting enough. From an engineering point of view, from a scientific point of view - from any. Distributed computing is a very broad and deep topic, where there is a place for everyone.

If you want to perform next to Lamport, it is quite possible. To become a speaker, you need to follow the link , carefully read everything there and do it according to the instructions.

Be calm, as soon as you join the process, they will help you. The program committee has sufficient capacity to help with the report itself, its essence and presentation. The coordinator will help to deal with organizational issues and so on.

Particular attention to the picture with dates. July is a rather distant date for the participant, and the speaker needs to start acting now.

SPTDC School

The conference will be held at the same venue with the SPTDS school, so for everyone who buys a school ticket, conference tickets are at a 20% discount .

Summer School on Practice and Theory of Distributed Computing (SPTCD) is a school that provides a wide range of courses on the practical and theoretical aspects of distributed systems that are conducted by recognized experts in the relevant field.

The school will be held in English, so here’s a list of topics to look at:

• Concurrent data structures: correctness and efficiency;
• Algorithms for non-volatile memory;
• Distributed computability;
• Distributed machine learning;
• State-machine replication and Paxos;
• Byzantine fault-tolerance;
• Algorithmic basics of blockchains.

The following speakers will perform:

• Leslie Lamport (Microsoft);
• Maurice Herlihy (Brown University);
• Michael Scott (University of Rochester);
• Dan Alistarh (IST Austria);
• Trevor Brown (University of Waterloo);
• Eli Gafni (UCLA);
• Danny Hendler (Ben Gurion University);
• Achour Mostefaoui (University of Nantes).

Playlist with reports from the previous school can be viewed freely on YouTube:

Next steps

The conference program is still being formed. Follow the news on Habré or in social networks ( fb , vk , twitter ).

If you really believe in the conference (or want to use the special starting price, as they say, “Early Bird”) - you can go to the website and purchase tickets .

See you at Hydra!