Today is PhD graduation day at Sorbonne University. The ceremony is a mix of solemn ritual and happy chaos: diplomas, sashes, official photos, applause, and a room full of people waiting for their turn on stage.
Since the class is large enough to make waiting part of the program, I am taking this moment to look back at what the past four years produced: a thesis manuscript, publications, open-source prototypes, research collaborations, and a fair amount of teaching.
Most of that work revolved around highly available collaborative systems at the edge, with Colony as the main research prototype: a hybrid-consistency datastore for peer-to-peer collaboration, CRDT-style APIs, and cloud-backed coordination.
Main Publications
Thesis Manuscript
Colony: a Hybrid Consistency System for Highly-Available Collaborative Edge Computing.
Highly-available and consistent group collaboration at the edge with colony
Middleware 2021: 22nd International Middleware Conference, Dec 2021, Québec / Virtual, Canada. pp.336-351,
Vers une cohérence causale évolutive sans chaînes de ralentissements
Compas 2017: Conférence d’informatique en Parallélisme, Architecture et Système, Jun 2017, Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France.
Open Source projects
ColonyDB
My Thesis research prototype.
A local-first Edge datastore, with Peer-to-Peer groups strong consistency collaboration, CRDT API and cloud backend.
AntidoteDB
AntidoteDB is a highly available geo-replicated key-value database. AntidoteDB provides features that help programmers to write correct applications while having the same performance and horizontal scalability as AP/NoSQL databases. Furthermore, AntidoteDB operations are based on the principle of synchronization-free execution by using Conflict-free replicated datatypes (CRDTs).
CRDT Collaborative Spreadsheet
A Collaborative CRDT-based Spreadsheet demo app, built using my collaborative local-first service on top of PouchDB.
CRDT Markdown Editor
Collaborative text editing application using two eventual consitency backends: revision-based and CRDT-based. This demo shows that with a revision based approach, the user loses updates, either if updates are executed concurrently online, or if multiple users edit the document offline.
Collaborations
RainbowFS ANR Project
RainbowFS is a collaborative research project funded by French National Agency for Research (ANR), this project founded my thesis grant and the collaboration behind the Colony paper.
The aim of RainbowFS is to investigate an approach to distributed storage that ensures consistency semantics tailored to the application, while retaining scalability and availability.
LightKone EU Consortium
The EU project LightKone aims to develop a scientifically sound and industrially validated model for doing general-purpose computation on edge networks.
SyncFree EU Project
The SyncFree project aims to develop both theoretical and practical understanding of large-scale synchronisation-free programming. AntidoteDB is one of this projects main contributions.
Teaching
During my thesis, I taught in the following courses:
- Programming inside the Linux Kernel (master 1).(2021)
- Multicore Kernels and Virtualisation (master 2), memory garbage collection part. (2018, 2019, 2020)
- Security and System Administration (master 1).(2017, 2018, 2019)
- Introduction to operating systems (licence 2). (2019)
- Introduction to Java langage (licence 2). (2018)
