16-03-2015
João Leitão, a NOVA LINCS researcher was invited to make a presentation at the industry conference RICON 2014 sponsored by Basho Inc. The presentation, in collaboration with a Basho senior engineer, covered the design of the new cluster metadata subsystem of RIAK, a commercial distributed datastore developed by Basho Inc. The new cluster metadata subsystem leverages on a gossip dissemination protocol, previously proposed by the researcher, named Plumtree. The talk covered several possible designs for such dissemination protocols, and showed how the problems addressed by academia closely fitted the practical issues found by RIAK’s engineers.
The talk then discussed the design of the Plumtree protocol, which combines gossip-based and tree-based dissemination mechanisms to extract the inherent benefits of both classes of solutions. The talk concluded with a brief discussion on the practical benefits that such an academic solution brought to a commercial product. In particular, the adoption of Plumtree by RIAK’s engineers minimized the number of redundant messages used by their cluster metadata subsystem, while improving the dissemination times in about 66%.
Both presenters were also invited to participate in the Think Distributed panel at the end of the conference (part of the Think Distributed podcast). The main topic of the panel was the collaboration between academia and industry.
