Events

Computer Science Department Colloquium Decentralization at Scale: Rethinking Design of Distributed Systems
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Speaker: Suyash Gupta

Bio

Suyash Gupta is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oregon. Prior to joining UO, he received his Ph.D. degree from University of California, Davis and did postdoctoral research as University of California, Berkeley. He also holds two Master of Science degrees: one from Purdue University and other from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. His current research focuses on designing efficient, fault tolerant distributed consensus and communication, and federated learning algorithms. He has also co-authored a book on fault-tolerant distributed transaction processing at Morgan & Claypool. He has been awarded the Best Graduate Researcher Award for 2021 by UC Davis, Best Paper Award at EuroSys'23, and Distinguished Reviewer Award by SIGMOD'25. He also led the design of Apache ResilientDB, which is incubating under Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and is employed by researchers at multiple academic and industrial organizations. In his free time, Suyash likes to code, and his team won Best Hacker Award at BostonHacks, HackIllinois, and HackPrinceton, among others.

Location : CoRE 301

Committee: 

Event Type: Computer Science Department Colloquium

Abstract: Nearly half of the world’s population lives in regions where access to open and independent financial systems is limited or heavily regulated; individuals face restrictions on using traditional financial services or freely transferring funds. Even in stable economies, a high concentration of control over public resources creates systemic risk. A common approach to mitigating such centralized control is to adopt decentralized technologies: decentralized applications operate without the authority of any single organization by allowing multiple parties to share responsibility for data management. However, enabling multiple parties to operate together introduces the possibility of arbitrary failures. A well-known strategy to protect a consensus protocol—and, by extension, the underlying decentralized system—from arbitrary failures is to make it Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT). Existing BFT protocols, however, deliver substantially lower throughput and higher latency than industrial-grade protocols designed only for simpler crash failures. Furthermore, most BFT protocols depend on unrealistic trust assumptions, which has hindered their widespread adoption.My research focuses on making BFT consensus protocols more practical, which in turn can accelerate the adoption of decentralized systems beyond cryptocurrencies. Specifically, my work comprises three main thrusts: (1) optimizations for efficient consensus, (2) primitives for high-throughput communication among decentralized systems, and (3) applications to large-scale data management. In this talk, I will describe these thrusts and illustrate their impact on decentralized system design. I will also highlight efficient communication primitives that enable multiple groups of parties to communicate effectively in wide-area network (WAN) environments.

Organization: 

Contact  Associate Professor Sudarsun Kannan

Join Zoom Meeting
https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/2014444359?pwd=WW9ybFNCNVFrUWlycHowSHdNZjhzUT09

Meeting ID: 201 444 4359
Password: 550978