Get best of the week

SPTDC 2020 - Third School of Practice and Theory of Distributed Computing

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In distributed systems, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.

To prove that the joke in the epigraph is absolute stupidity, this is the third time that we have conducted the SPTDC (school on practice and theory of distributed computing). We alreadytalkedabout the history of the school, its co-founders Petra Kuznetsova and Vitaliy Aksyonov, as well as the participation of the JUG Ru Group in the SPTDC organizationon Habré. Therefore, today - about the school in 2020, about lectures and lecturers, as well as about the differences between the school and the conference.

SPTDC School will be held from July 6 to 9, 2020 in Moscow.

All lectures will be in English.Main lecture topics: persistent concurrent computing, cryptographic tools for distributed systems, formal methods for verifying consensus protocols, consistency in large-scale systems, distributed machine learning.


Immediately guessed in what military rank the characters in the picture? I adore you.


Lecturers and lectures


Nir Shavit is a professor at MIT and Tel Aviv University, co-author of the great book The Art of Multiprocessor Programming , winner of the Dijkstra Prize for the development and implementation of Transactional Programming Memory (STM), and the Gödel Prize for his work on applying algebraic topology to computational modeling with shared memory, co-founder of Neural Magic , a company that creates fast machine learning algorithms for conventional CPUs, and, of course, the owner of its own Wikipedia page with dashing and sultry photography. Nir already participated in our school in 2017, where he made an exhaustive review of the techniques for taking locks ( part 1 ,part 2 ). What Nir will talk about this year, we do not know yet, but we are hoping for news from the cutting edge of science.

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 developing synchronization algorithms for computing with shared memory and its own page on Wikipedia . Last year, Michael gave a lecture at our school about non-blocking data structures ( part 1 , part 2 ). This year he will talk about programming usingnon-volatile memory (NVM), which reduces program complexity and memory overhead compared to “regular” random access memory (DRAM).

Idit Keidar , a professor at the Technion and owner of the Hirsch index of about 40 (which is very, very much) goes over two hundred scientific articles in the field of distributed computing, multithreading, and fault tolerance. Goes for the first time participating in our school, where she will give a lecture on the basic aspects of the operation of distributed data warehouses: emulating distributed memory, building consensus and changing configurations.

Rodrigo Rodrigues - Professor at Técnico, Member of the INESC-ID Laboratoryand author of research on distributed systems. This year, at our school, Rodrigo will talk about consistency and isolation in distributed data warehouses, and also, using the CAP theorem , will analyze the feasibility in practice of several models of consistency and isolation.

Chen Jing (Jing Chen) - Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, author of research works in the field of blokcheyna and a leading scientist in the Algorand - blokcheyn company and platform, using a consensus algorithm, based entirely on the Proof of Stake. This year, at our school, Chen will talk about the Algorand blockchain and how to achieve its interesting properties: low demands on the computing resources of the network, the impossibility of splitting the transaction history and guaranteeing the completion of transaction processing after it is added to the blockchain.

Christian Kashin (Christian Cachin) - Professor at the University of Bern, who heads a research group in the field of data protection, a co-author of the book « Introduction to Reliable and the Secure the Distributed Programming », developer blokcheyn platform Hyperledger Fabric A (about it was even a post Habré ) and author of the research works in the field of cryptography and security in distributed systems. This year at our school Christianwill give a four-part lecture on critographic tools for distributed computing: symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, as well as shared-key cryptography , pseudorandom numbers and verified random number generation .

Vukolich Marco (Marko Vukolic) - researcher at IBM Research, the author works in the field of blokcheyna and developer Hyperledger Fabric. We don’t know what Marco will talk about at our school this year, but we hope that we will learn about his latest developments in the field of blockchain: the study of the degradation of the performance of distributed consensus protocols on clusters of up to 100 machines, the Mir broadcast protocolglobal order and Byzantine fault tolerance or bezblochnom blokcheyne StreamChain , minimizes transaction processing time.

Prasad Jayanti is a professor at Dartmouth College, a member of the elite Ivy League , and the author of research papers in the field of multithreaded algorithms. This year, at our school, Prasad will give a lecture on thread synchronization and algorithms for implementing various mutex options : with interrupt or restore functions in non-volatile memory models, as well as with separate read and write operations.

Alexey Gotsman (Alexey Gotsman) - professor at IMDEA and authorresearch work in the field of software verification of algorithms. We do not yet know what Alexey will give a lecture at our school this year, but we are counting on the topic at the intersection of program verification and distributed systems.


Why is it a school and not a conference?


Firstly, lecturers speak in an academic format and read each large lecture in two pairs: "an hour and a half - a break - another hour and a half." Many years after the university, with the habit of hourly reports at conferences and 10-minute clips on YouTube - this can be difficult. A good lecturer will make all three hours interesting, but everyone is responsible for the plasticity of his own brain.

Useful advice: practice on videos of school lectures in 2017 and in 2019 . Goodbye, work - hello, Byzantine generals.

Secondly, lecturers focus on scientific research and talk about fundamental principles.distributed systems and parallel computing, and about the news from the cutting edge of science. If your goal is to quickly program something and install it in production the next day after school without delay, this can also be difficult.

Helpful Hint: Search for school lecturer research on Google Scholar and arXiv.org . If you get high on scientific pagers, you will love the school too.

Thirdly, SPTDC 2020 is not a conference, because a conference on distributed systems and parallel computing is Hydra 2020 . Recently on Habré there was a post with an overview of her program. Last year, SPTDC and Hydra were held simultaneously on the same site. This year they do not overlap in dates, so they do not compete with each other for your time and attention.

Helpful Hint: Look at the Hydra conference program and think about attending the conference after school. It will be a good week.

How to get to school?


  • Write down the dates from July 6 to July 9, 2020 (or better, July 11 to go to the Hydra conference after school).
  • Gather your courage, get ready.
  • Choose your tickets and go to school.

More articles:


All Articles