Virtualized physical clocks.

Title of the Talk: Virtualized physical clocks.
Speaker: Prof. Sandeep Kulkarni
Host Faculty: Prof.Satya Peri
Date: Febrary 05, 2025
Time: 11:00 to 12:00 pm
Venue: CSE-LH3

Abstract:
There is a gap between the theory and practice of distributed systems in terms of the use of time. The theory of distributed systems shunned the notion of time and introduced “causality tracking” as a clean abstraction to reason about concurrency. The practical systems employed physical time (NTP) information but in a best effort manner due to the difficulty of achieving tight clock synchronization. To bridge this gap and reconcile the theory and practice of distributed systems on the topic of time, we propose a hybrid logical clock. We argue that this can be used simultaneously as a physical clock (with NTP like guarantees) and logical clock (with causality tracking). This can also expediate database applications, allow easy snapshot of different systems, and expediate execution of web engines.

Biography:
Dr. Sandeep Kulkarni received his BTech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay in 1993. He received his MS and PhD from Ohio State University in 1994 and 1999 respectively. He has been working at Michigan State University from 1999 where he is currently a professor. Since 2019, he is also the associate chair for graduate studies. His area of research is Parallel and Distributed systems, Program synthesis, Security and Privacy, Runtime verification and software engineering. His work has been supported by NSF, DARPA, AFOSR and ONR.

Venue: CSE-LH3