Lecture

Shared Atomic Objects

Speaker:	Panagiota Fatourou
Date:	Friday, 28 March 2008
Time:	12:00-14:00
Location:	"Mediterranean Studies" Seminar Room, FORTH. Heraklion, Crete
Host:	E. Markatos

Abstract:

Current generation of processors provides increased parallelism through shared memory rather than increased clock speed. The programming of shared memory machines, as well as the development of applications to run on top of them is nowadays highly desirable but it is a notoriously difficult task. The design of efficient shared objects that can be accessed simultaneously by many processes is a way to overcome this problem. Since distributed objects enable the communication between processes of a distributed system, they simplify the task of programming such systems and for this reason they usually lie at the heart of most distributed algorithms. The design of shared objects that are efficient enough to be practical is therefore an important research direction in distributed computing. This presentation focuses on recent research results on the design and analysis of fundamental shared atomic objects and distributed data structures. A collection of algorithms and lower bounds on the complexity of implementing such objects will be discussed.

Bio:

Panagiota Fatourou is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Ioannina, Greece. She got her B.Sc. degree from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Crete, Greece, in 1995 and her Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics of the University of Patras, Greece, in 1999. She has spent time as a postdoctoral fellow at Max-Planck Institut fuer Informatik, Germany, and at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms (with emphasis to distributed algorithms), distributed computing and parallel computing.

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