Systems Presentation

Plausible Clocks with Guaranteed Precision

Dr. Paul Sivilotti
Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering
The Ohio State University

Friday, Dec. 3rd
3:30pm; 480 Dreese Labs
All interested parties are invited.
Pizza will be served after the talk.

Abstract:
In a distributed system with N processes, time stamps of size N (such as vector clocks) are necessary to accurately track potential causality between events. "Plausible clocks" are a family of time-stamping schemes that use smaller time stamps at the expense of some accuracy. To date, all plausible clocks have been designed to use fixed-sized time stamps, and the inaccuracy of these schemes varies from run to run.

I will describe a new metric, imprecision, that formally characterizes the fidelity of a plausible clock. We have developed a novel plausible clock system that guarantees an arbitrary constant bound on imprecision. This bound is achieved by allowing time stamps to grow and shrink over the course of the computation. This is joint work with Brad Moore.

These talks are funded by a grant from the Ohio Board of Regents.