mathematicians and infrastructure
we were recently invited to give a talk at this year’s sigmod. it’s quite an honor. another talk on the same industrial track is being given by some folks from google about megastore, a layer they’ve written on top of bigtable to make it easier to build web applications. the full abstract and authors list is below.
the last author is a former classmate of mine at harvard and a fellow mathematics major. we recently had another former mathematician come by the facebook offices to present his work on distributed storage: peter braam, who architected the lustre file system.
Megastore: A Scalable Data System for User Facing Applications
JJ Furman, Jonas S Karlsson, Jean-Michel Leon, Alex Lloyd, Steve Newman, and Philip Zeyliger
Megastore provides a rich model and API that facilitates implementation of user facing applications storing data in Bigtable. Our goal is to enable Google developers to quickly build and launch highly available applications at Google scale. We extend Bigtable to provide strong consistency guarantees and higher level abstractions such as transactions, secondary indexes and synchronous replication. Megastore takes a practical approach to schema management, providing integrated declarative schemas with rich data extensions, such as logical data partitioning, which is key to achieve high performance querying and scalable massively parallel transactions.
