The 48th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN-2018) was held in Luxembourg City. The four-day event (June 25-28) saw thematic workshops and a series of more than 60 presentations by scholars in the realms of dependability and security research, fields that have been the raison d’être of DSN conferences over the years.
It is a matter of great pride for EPFL that the organizers awarded the Best Paper Award to Kristina Spirovska, Diego Didona, and Willy Zwaenepoel for their seminal contribution, “Wren: Nonblocking Reads in a Partitioned Transactional Causally Consistent Data Store.” All of them are attached to the Operating Systems Laboratory (LABOS). They worked together earlier on “Optimistic Causal Consistency for Geo-Replicated Key-Value Stores,” a research paper presented at the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems held in Atlanta last year.
Their research paper at DSN-2018 presented Wren, the first Transactional Causal Consistency (TCC) system that simultaneously implements nonblocking read operations with low latency, and allows an application to scale out within a replication site by sharding. The system introduces new protocols for transaction execution, dependency tracking, and stabilization.
The Best Paper Award is a highly acclaimed honor conferred by the organizers on the most outstanding scientific paper among all papers included in the Main Track. The selection process involves three phases: shortlisting of papers by the Program Committee, the announcement of three finalists by the DSN Steering Committee prior to the conference, and voting by DSN attendees in a special plenary paper session.
Link to the award-winning paper: