Scalable Overlay Design for Topic-Based Publish/Subscribe Systems and Fast Overlay Construction Algorithms
Prof. Roman Vitenberg
University of Oslo

ABSTRACT

Pub/sub is a paradigm for asynchronous communication that is commonly used in a great variety of industrial applications, such as news tickers, delivery of financial data, Military applications, and many others. While client-server communication still remains the prevailing implementation paradigm for pub/sub, its limitations for large-scale applications are widely recognized. Major industrial players such as Google and Tibco are recognizing the potential of cooperative overlays and starting to replace legacy centralized architectures. However, the lack of adequate technologies hinders this industrial shift.

In this talk, I will consider the problem of designing a scalable overlay network to support decentralized topic-based pub/sub communication. I will present the overview of the state-of-the-art in this area and our recent results, both analytical and experimental, based on the ICDCS'10 and ICDCS'11 publications. These results (a) improve the runtime complexity of existing algorithms, (b) address the challenge of incremental construction by introducing the overlay join problem, and (c) allow for parallelized overlay construction while retaining the high quality of the centralized design.

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Roman Vitenberg is a faculty member at the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. In the past, he was a visiting researcher at the University of California at Santa-Barbara, Universita di Roma La Sapienza, and Universidad Politècnica de Madrid. He also spent three years as a research staff member at IBM Research where he was on the team that devised and developed the high-availability component of WebSphere.

His research interests are broadly in the area of distributed applications, middleware and algorithms; including specification, design, analysis, implementation, performance evaluation, and software engineering. In particular, he has been working on large-scale communication, object-oriented and component-based platforms, distributed event-based systems, consistency models, and fault-tolerant distributed computing.