Track: Modern CS in the real world

Location:

Day of week:

Computer Science research did not stop at QuickSort or the LR algorithm. In this track we'll cover topics such as probabilistic algorithms and data structures, new security and distributed algorithms, advances in typing, formal methods, new approaches to concurrency and much more. Why? Because we need to tackle ever more data in shorter periods of time - but our CPUs don't get much faster. Concurrency helps - but that just brings new problems to tackle, and meanwhile more moving parts just means more things that can fall over if we're not careful.

Time to sneak a peek at approaches real companies use to tackle this issues using Computer Science research and results from the last few decades.

Track Host:
Adrian Colyer
Venture Partner @AccelPartners
Venture Partner at Accel Partners, London Author of 'The Morning Paper' (https://blog.acolyer.org) Previously held CTO roles at SpringSource, VMware, and Pivotal.
10:35am - 11:25am

by Peter Bourgon
Engineer @Weaveworks and Maintainer of Go Kit

by Matthias Radestock
Co-founder and CTO @Weaveworks, previously co-founded RabbitMQ

We built Weave Net to make it easy to network your Docker containers however you like. At its core, Weave Net is powered by an eventually-consistent, partition-tolerant, completely decentralised mesh. We're packaging this technology as Weave Mesh, so that you can build your own distributed applications with the same simplicity and reliability as Weave Net. In this talk we will explain the theory behind Weave Mesh, some of the key features we learned were important, and demonstrate some...

11:50am - 12:40pm

by Aysylu Greenberg
Software Engineer @Google

Modern systems in production rely on decades of computer science research. Over time, new architectural patterns emerge that enable more resilient and robust systems. In this talk, we'll discuss some of these patterns from systems I've worked on at Google and the related work that provide insights into the motivations behind them.

1:40pm - 2:30pm

by Richard Kasperowski
Author of The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness

Open Space
2:55pm - 3:45pm

by Anil Madhavapeddy
Engineer @Docker

Much cloud infrastructure consists of small microservices that interoperate via standard protocols as HTTPS. Unikernels are a new technique that specialises the deployed service into a tiny, domain-specific kernel that eliminates any unnecessary pieces and runs in a single address space. Some unikernels (such as MirageOS) even offer full memory safety down to the device drivers, and can run on tiny ARM devices as well as cloud hypervisors.

Tooling for unikernels is still nascent, but...

4:10pm - 5:00pm

by Heidi Howard
Distributed Systems PhD Candidate @CambridgeComputerLab

In this talk, we explore how to construct resilient distributed systems on top of unreliable components.

Starting, almost two decades ago, with Leslie Lamport’s work on organising parliament for a Greek island. We will take a journey to today’s datacenters and the systems powering companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Along the way, we will face interesting impossibility results, machines acting maliciously and the complexity of today’s networks.

Ultimately, we will...

5:25pm - 6:15pm

by Matthew Sackman
GoshawkDB / LShift

It's well understood how logical clocks can be used to capture the order in which events occur. By extension, vector clocks encode when an event occurred across a distributed system. GoshawkDB reverses this idea: by analysing the dependencies between transactions, each participant calculates a vector clock that captures the constraints necessary to achieve strong serializability. The vector clocks from the different participants in a transaction can then be combined safely using the same...

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