Professors Asaf Cidon and Junfeng Yang, along with their research team, have been honored with the Best Paper Award at the 14th Annual Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2024) for their groundbreaking work on Chablis, a geo-distributed multi-version transactional key-value store.
The award-winning paper addresses the long-standing challenges in geo-distributed databases, particularly the limitations in supporting strictly-serializable transactions across multiple regions without sacrificing latency or requiring a restricted programming model. Their research introduces Chablis, which allows for low-latency read-write transactions within a single region and lock-free global snapshot reads, pushing the boundaries of what is technically possible in modern data centers.
Chablis differentiates itself by providing a scalable solution that operates across multiple data centers without the need for specialized hardware or assumptions about maximum clock skew. The system utilizes an innovative global epoch mechanism that separates the concerns of maintaining and advancing epoch counters from their publication. This allows Chablis to deliver not only fast local transactions but also strictly-serializable global transactions without impacting latency.
Receiving this award underscores the relevance and urgency of improving transactional systems in global applications. Columbia Engineering School's professors challenge previous assumptions that geo-distributed transactions must compromise between consistency and latency.
Read the full paper here.
