Colloquium Computer Science: Dr.Claudio Mezzina, IMT Lucca, Italy

Title: Choreographies for Automatic Recovery

Abstract:
Reversible computing is attracting interest as a suitable abstraction for a range of application domains (e.g., transactions, autonomicity, and fault tolerance). The ability to potentially “undo” computations provides us with an ideal setting to study, revisit, or imagine alternative techniques to build dependable systems. Recently, reversible computing has also been advocated as a convenient approach to debug distributed applications.

In this talk I will show how fault handling policies can be expressed from a global point of view of the system (e.g., via a choreography) and then how these policies are translated to local implementations.

The proposal is based on a conservative extension of global graphs and communicating finite-state machines. The main advantage of our approach is that to control reversibility no instrumentation of models is needed except for a minor decoration of the branches of distributed choices. I will then show that our models are conservative extensions of existing ones and that the reversible semantics guarantees causal consistency, a key property in reversible computing.

Finally, I will sketch future directions on how this technique can be blended with modern techniques of runtime monitor for actor based languages (e.g., Erlang), to automatically generate runtime monitors that will enable a coordinated rollback of the system when certain conditions are no more satisfied.

Speaker's bio:

Dr. Claudio Antares Mezzina received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering, from both Université Joseph Fourier (France) and Università di Bologna (Italy) in February 2012, under the supervision of Jean-Bernard Stefani and Davide Sangiorgi. During his PhD he focused on the interplay between concurrency and reversibility in the setting of Higher-Order Pi. Before, he received a Laurea Degree cum laude from the Università di Bologna (October 2007). Since February 2008 he has been a member of the SARDES team at INRIA Rhone Alpes in Grenoble. Before joining the SysMA research unit at IMT as Assistant Professor in December 2014, he has been researcher within the SOA team at FBK in Trento working on adaptable business processes, goal models and smart cities.

His main research interests include formal methods, reversible computing, programming abstractions for fault-tolerant systems, programming languages and compilers.

Colloquium coordinators are Prof.dr. M. Aiello (e-mail : M.Aiello rug.nl ) and Prof.dr. M. Biehl (e-mail: M.Biehl rug.nl )