As cloud applications are becoming increasingly complex, how can we show more structure in the data center? On October 13, 2021, the second session of the"TIME·Frontier" Seminar was successfully held by the School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, with the theme of"Communication Paradigms For Cloud Systems".More than 50 experts and scholars in the field listened to a presentation by renowned Professor Robbert van Renesse of Cornell University's School of Computer Science and Technology via zoom online conference.
Robbert van Renesse is a professor and director of graduate studies at the School of Computer Science and Technology of Cornell University. He was the Chairman of ACM SIGOPS (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems) and recently, he has been the Co-chair of SOSP's(Symposium of Operating Systems Principles)project committee. In addition, Professor Robbert served as associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys, the most cited journal in computer science. From 2011 to 2021, Professor Robbert conducted research in the areas of cloud and container frameworks and high-performance scalable distributed systems. In the seminar, Professor Robbert delivered an excellent presentation on two ways to show more structure of communication in the data center, and also gave detailed answers to questions raised by Xiao Jiang and the other two teachers.
This seminar explores two ways to make communication in data centers more structured. The first is the "Esher" model, an approach to building and deploying multi-layer cloud applications. "Esher" is designed to allow the system to be derived in a modular manner and to evolve over time. To this end, Escher includes (i)A new authenticated message bus that hides the underlying implementation details of the different layers of the distributed system from each other; (ii) A generic wrapper captures the implementation of the application, for example, automatically deploying a shared or replicated version of the application. The second approach is to add more structure through execution and usefully ordered shared logs for all communication in the data center, such as simplifying analysis, fault recovery, processing rules, and application-level consistency attributes.
In the second half of the seminar, Professor Renesse had a brief exchange with the scholars attending the conference. In response to the content shared by professors, scholars expressed their opinions and raised questions based on their own research. Professor Renesse discussed the application of the "Esher" model to blockchain and the rules of choice, and the special aspects of scaling language. Xiao said that he had heard Professor Renesse's talk about Vegvisir back in 2018 and was deeply inspired. He looks forward to having more communication with Professor Renesse via email in the future.
"Victory is ensured when people pool their strength; success is secured when people put their heads together." The participants all said that cloud applications would become more complex, and we should always understand and rethink the communication structure and methods, pool our strengths together, follow the trend, and look for the future!
