Subject: next week's 590L
From: Craig Chambers (chambers@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Wed May 02 2001 - 10:38:54 PDT
On May 9, 590L will be taken over by Benjamin Pierce to give a second talk:
> FILE SYNCHRONIZATION: THEORY AND PRACTICE
>
> Benjamin C. Pierce
> Loew 105,
> Wednesday, May 9, 1:30pm
> University of Pennsylvania
>
> Host: Craig Chambers
>
> Mobile computing devices intended for disconnected operation, such as
> laptops and personal organizers, must employ optimistic replication
> strategies for user files. Unlike traditional distributed systems,
> such devices do not attempt to present a ``single filesystem''
> semantics: users are aware that their filesystems are replicated, and
> that updates to one replica will not be seen in another until some
> point of synchronization is reached (often under the user's explicit
> control). A variety of tools, collectively called FILE SYNCHRONIZERS,
> support this mode of operation.
>
> Present-day synchronizers seldom give the user enough information to
> predict how they will behave under all circumstances. Simple slogans
> like ``Non-conflicting updates are propagated to other replicas'' ignore
> numerous subtleties---e.g., Precisely what constitutes a conflict
> between
> updates in different replicas? What does the synchronizer do if updates
> conflict? What happens when files are renamed? What if the directory
> structure is reorganized in one replica? What do we do with meta-data
> such as permission bits, modtimes, symbolic links, etc., etc.? Can we
> meaningfully synchronize meta-data between different filesystem
> architectures (e.g. FAT32 and Ext2)?
>
> The UNISON project aims to address these issues at two (interacting)
> levels:
>
> ENGINEERING -- building and distributing a synchronization tool,
> emphasizing portability (across Windows and Unix systems),
> heterogeneous operation (_between_ Windows and Unix systems),
> robustness, and clean semantics.
>
> SPECIFICATION -- developing a simple, concrete, and precise framework
> for describing the behavior of file synchronizers.
>
> I'll describe our efforts at both levels.
>
> [Joint work with Trevor Jim and Jerome Vouillon.]
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