The Pub-Time Parliament

• Dr. Jim Webber Chief Scientist at Neo4J
• Email: jim@jimwebber.org

Title: The Pub-Time Parliament

Abstract: Imagine a busy pub in Newcastle on a Friday night. It's crowded, lots of people are talking at the same time. They're all exchanging information with each other which makes tiny changes in their brains. Some folks are taking it easy on the drink, a few are a bit tipsy after one too many beers, and my mate Stevo is plastered, falling off his barstool. Classic Stevo. Now imagine trying to get this crowd to agree on something when they can't even agree on which footy team is the worst this week and some of them can't remember their own names.

In comparison you'd think that getting a bunch of computers to agree on something, say a simple number would be pretty easy. Computers can do way smarter things than agreeing upon a number, right? Sadly not. Computers are often in various states of being wrong or crashing. Much like a bunch of drunks they all want to talk at the same time, and they're confident they have the best opinion.

How have we have built such incredible systems on such a flakey foundation? In this talk we will visit classic consensus algorithms and see how they provide benefits of correctness and fault-tolerance for systems but at the price of reduced scalability. Then we'll explore some new research which aims to provide both correctness and scalability for distributed systems.

Bio: Dr. Jim Webber is Neo4j’s Chief Scientist and Visiting Professor at Newcastle University. At Neo4j, Jim leads the Systems Research Group, working on a variety of database systems research topics, including query languages and runtimes, scale, and fault tolerance. He also co-authored several books on graph technology, including Graph Databases - 1st and 2nd Editions (O’Reilly), Graph Databases for Dummies (Wiley), and Building Knowledge Graphs (O’Reilly).

Before Neo4j, Jim worked on fault-tolerant distributed systems, first at Newcastle University startup Arjuna and then for a variety of clients for the global consulting firm ThoughtWorks. Along the way, Jim co-authored the distributed systems books REST in Practice (O’Reilly) and Developing Enterprise Web Services—An Architect’s Guide (Prentice-Hall).

Jim’s blog is located at https://jimwebber.org and he tweets sometimes at @jimwebber.