Kremlin Towers in Hydra's Embrace: Hydra 2020 Parallel and Distributed Computing Conference

The first Hydra conference dedicated to parallel and distributed systems was held in St. Petersburg last year . Presentations were made by the Dijkstra Prize and Turing Prize laureates ( Leslie Lampport , Maurice Herlichi and Michael Scott ), creators of compilers and programming languages ​​(C ++, Go, Java, Kotlin), distributed database developers (Cassandra, CosmosDB, Yandex Database), as well creators and researchers of algorithms and data structures (CRDT, Paxos, wait-free data structures). In general, you can already take a vacation at this place, minimize the IDE window, open a YouTube playlist with the best Hydra 2019 reports - and let task scheduler wait a bit.

In general, there has never been such a conference, and now it will happen again. Again with reports in English , because there is no better language to talk about parallel and distributed computing. Again in the summer, July 6-9 , because the speakers have time to study and teach, for example, at the universities of Cambridge, Rochester and St. Petersburg, and other times of the year are not for them.

The new Hydra has a more intricate program, new speakers along with the heroes of last year, as well as a familiar feeling of the enthusiasm distributed among the participants from the parallel hardcore in three rooms.




Immediately lay on the table a deck of cards with the shirts of the Byzantine generals up - we want the program of the new Hydra to be more detailed and diverse. Last time we scratched with a fingernail, now we’ll dig wider and deeper. Here are the Hydra 2020 themes with diffs from last year: How to talk about all this in the program of one conference? This is certainly not easier than testing the linearizability of operations in a new shiny distributed storage using Jepsen , but we will try. Here's the one already in the program: Cindy Sridharan is a San Francisco-based distributed systems developer, author of a small book Distributed Systems Observability (get a free electronic copy ) and a popular blog

  Parallel systems:
* Algorithms & data structures
* Memory models
* Compilers, runtime
* Memory reclamation
* Testing & verification
* Hardware issues
* Non-volatile memory
* Transactional memory
* Scheduling algorithms & implementations
* Heterogeneous computing: CPU, GPU, FPGA, etc.
* Performance analysis, debugging, & optimization

  Distributed systems:
* Distributed computing
* Distributed machine learning/deep learning
* State machine replication & consensus
* Fault tolerance & resilience
* Testing & verification
* Hardware issues
* Blockchain & Byzantine fault tolerance
* Distributed databases, NewSQL
* Distributed stream processing
* Scheduling algorithms & implementations
* Cluster management systems
* Security
* Performance analysis, debugging, & optimization
* Peer-to-peer, gossip protocols
* Internet of things






, where only the article “ Best of 2019 in Tech Talks ” can save a couple of days off, but leave them happy. At Hydra 2020, Cindy will talk about how to test distributed systems , even if they store state.

Michael Scott is a researcher at the University of Rochester , known to all Java developers as the creator of non-blocking algorithms and synchronous queues from the standard Java library. Of course, with the Dijkstra Prize for " Algorithms for scalable synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors " and its own Wikipedia page . Last year, Michael made at Hydra the best (according to your estimates) report ondual data structures , and now he will talk about the Hodor project and the safe work with shared memory available to parallel processes.

Heidi Howard is a researcher at the University of Cambridge , known for creating Flexible Paxos distributed consensus algorithm , as well as generalizing Flexible Paxos and Fast Paxos . Last year, Heidi talked about how the Paxos family of algorithms is arranged and works (one of the best reports), and now she will try to walk on thin ice between Paxos lovers and Raft supporters - and share her opinion on which of the algorithms is better.

Martin Kleppmann is perhaps even a better known researcher at the University of Cambridge, and in the past, a big data processor who wrote a surprisingly understandable and therefore unique book on distributed systems called Designing Data-Intensive Applications . Last year, Martin shared the results of his CRDT research, and what he will talk about now - we will announce later .

Nikita Koval(Nikita Koval) is a coroutine developer on the Kotlin team, a teacher of the multi-threaded programming course at ITMO, and a member of the program committee of the Hydra conference (yes, the one about which this article). Last year, Nikita talked about testing multi-threaded data structures on the JVM platform using Lin-Check , and on Hydra 2020 he will talk about SegmentQueueSynchronizer - an abstraction verified by the Iris framework for the Coq prover for programming synchronization primitives.

Follow our asynchronous announcements: in total there will be about three dozen reports at the conference, we will soon talk about the rest. Still, of course, there will be discussion zones at the conference, where it is necessary to test speakers with questions in one or more streams until a consensus is reached.


And if you're lucky, Martin Kleppmann will sign you a book.

Yes, in parallel with the Hydra 2020 conference, namely July 6–9, SPTDC 2020 , the third summer school in the theory and practice of distributed computing , will be held . At it you will find sensations that are difficult to get at the conference, so we will talk about the School in a separate post.

What now? First, follow the news on Habré and in social networks ( Facebook , Vkontakte , Twitter)

Secondly, if you already felt an irresistible desire to attend the conference - study the site, there you can already buy tickets .

Thirdly, do not miss the opportunity to chat with the Hydra 2020 conference program committee in the comments. PC members will be happy to talk with you about the topics of the upcoming conference.

Meet me at Hydra!