Besides his activities at ABS, Sebastian Blessing works on his Ph.D. thesis „Distributed Programming with Actors” at Imperial College in London.
As part of this, he attended the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications, short SPLASH, in Vancouver in late October 2017. This is one of the leading conferences in the field of research, theoretical computer science, programming languages and software development.
In cooperation with Prof. Sophia Drossopoulou (Imperial College) and Sylvan Clebsch (Microsoft Research), he presented a paper on causal message delivery. In distributed systems, the delivery order of messages is a major and performance-critical challenge. By laying the foundation for so-called vector clocks, Leslie Lamport (ACM Turing Award winner) made the crucial contribution to solve these challenges. Vector clocks make it possible to detect the delivery of messages in a non-causal order. However, the necessary meta-information potentially need many resources.
Instead of detecting delivery order errors and then running recovery logs, Blessing, Clebsch, and Drossopoulou proposed a solution that guarantees the causal delivery of messages. The collection of metadata information is thus eliminated. The basis for this is a hierarchical arrangement of all participating nodes in the form of a tree topology.
Furthermore, the paper provides a mathematical model for capturing the interrelationships as well as a proof of the correctness of the causal message delivery.
In the link below you are provided with a detailed insight into the paper:
https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~scb12/publications/splashws17ageremain-p2-p-bdc7425-34082-final.pdf
Being an active part of computer science research, Sebastian develops his personal competence and at the same time it supports the determination of the coding philosophy for creating up-to-date business software in our company.
We wish Sebastian a lot of fun and success in the further course of his dissertation!
