U.S.-France Cooperative Research (INRIA): Synchronization Approaches for Managing Distributed Data

University Of California-Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara CA

Investigators

Abstract

0095527 El Abbadi This three-year award for U.S.-France cooperative research involves Amr El Abbadi, Divyakant Agrawal of the University of Santa Barbara and Jean-Michel Helary, Achour Mostefaoui, and Michel Raynal of the IRISA project at the Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA) and University of Rennes in Rennes, France. The US and French research teams will address issues in the management of data in distributed systems. They will explore distributed data warehouse problems and problems of replication. In the former, local data are maintained and updated in various sites. A data warehouse is then required to maintain aggregate information summaries. Information is incorporated into the warehouse in an incremental manner, and message passing is used to calculate the incremental changes. In the replication problem, various copies of different objects are stored on sites in a distributed system. The goal is to execute transactions locally at each site, and then propagate the updates while maintaining the ability to serialize. The US team at Santa Barbara brings to this collaboration expertise in the area of distributed databases and replication. This is complemented by the IRISA/INRIA team's expertise in solving distributed systems problems using causality, checkpointing and consensus. The project will advance understanding of methods and techniques for managing large amounts of data in distributed systems. It may result in significant efficiencies and better understanding of the interplay between ordering of events and semantics of events in distributed systems. This award represents the US side of a joint proposal to the NSF and the French National Institute for Research in Informatics and Applied Mathematics (INRIA). NSF will cover travel funds and living expenses for the US investigators and graduate student. INRIA will support the visits of French researchers and graduate student to the United States.