Biography for Deniz Altinbuken


Briefly about me

I'm a PhD student in Systems at Cornell University. My interests are in distributed systems and the theory of distributed computing with a focus on building infrastructure services for large-scale distributed systems. Currently, I am working on an open service that provides replication and synchronization support for large-scale distributed systems, namely OpenReplica.

Why am I interested in Smalltalk?

Smalltalk envisions to be a computer language designed specifically for a wide range of humans rather than a narrow group of computer specialists. It can be easier to implement simple programs with Smalltalk in comparison to more complicated programming languages, such as C++. But when it comes to more advanced tasks such as a correct Paxos implementation, this might not be the case. I'm very interested in seeing how such a non-trivial task can be done with Smalltalk.

Why can I implement Paxos in Smalltalk?

I have been working with Paxos as the underlying consensus protocol to implement a Replicated State Machine for OpenReplica. I implemented Paxos from scratch in Python as part of this project, taught classes about the protocol and I know all the tricky details that make the protocol work in all corner cases. I understand how Paxos works and I have implemented a correct version that works entirely on my own.




Updated: 17.11.2014