ORMC'96 Invited Talk:
Bayou: A Replicated Storage System for Mobile Environments

Karin Petersen

Xerox PARC


Abstract

Bayou is a replicated, weakly consistent storage system designed for a mobile computing environment that includes portable machines with less than ideal network connectivity. To maximize availability, users can read from and write to any accessible replica. Bayou's design has focused on supporting application-specific mechanisms to detect and resolve the update conflicts that naturally arise in such a system, ensuring that replicas move towards eventual consistency, and defining a protocol by which the resolution of update conflicts stabilizes. It includes novel methods for conflict detection, called dependency checks, and per-write conflict resolution based on client-provided merge procedures.

Bayou's design also exhibits good scalability and adaptability since no operation involves more than two machines:

In the talk I will describe Bayou's architecture, discuss some of the implementation and security issues, as well our plans to explore Bayou as an infrastructure for asynchronous collaborative applications.

Brief Bio

Karin Petersen has been a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC's Computer Science Laboratory since September of 1993. Prior to joining PARC, Karin received an Engineering degree in Computer Science from the Simon Bolivar University (Venezuela) in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1993. Her research focuses on distributed and parallel systems, performance evaluation, and user interfaces for mobile and distributed applications.
Last modified: 18.04.2002 (Original version last modified prior to Sun Oct 6, 1996)