Many congratulations to Gregory Chockler!
His paper "Multi-Shot Distributed Transaction Commit", co-authored with Alexey Gotsman, was selected to share the DISC'18 Best Paper award. The award will be presented at the conference in October in New Orleans, its 32nd edition.
The International Symposium on DIStributed Computing (DISC) is one of the oldest and also one of the premier international conferences in Distributed Computing, with very low acceptance rates.
The paper introduces Transaction Certification Service (TCS): a new formal problem that captures safety guarantees of multi-shot transaction commit protocols with integrated concurrency control. TCS is parameterized by a certification function that can be instantiated to support common isolation levels, such as serializability and snapshot isolation. The authors then derive a provably correct crash-resilient protocol for implementing TCS through successive refinement. Their protocol achieves a better time complexity than mainstream approaches that layer two-phase commit on top of Paxos-style replication.
Gregory is Professor of Computer Science and Director of our Centre for Global and Distributed Computing.