Rachid Guerraoui

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Rachid Guerraoui (born January 5, 1967) is a Moroccan-Swiss computer scientist and a professor at the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), known for his contributions in the fields of concurrent and distributed computing.[1][2] He is an ACM Fellow[3] and the Chair in Informatics and Computational Science for the year 2018–2019 at Collège de France for distributed computing.[4]

Education and career[edit]

Rachid was born on January 5, 1967, in Rabat, Morocco. His father, Mohammed Guerraoui, is a teacher of mathematics and former wali (governor) of Marrakesh. His mother, Fatima Rahmoun-Guerraoui, is a teacher of French. After getting his baccalaureate in 1984, he left Morocco for France.[5][6]

Guerraoui received his PhD from the University of Orsay (1992) and has been affiliated with Ecole des Mines of Paris, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique of Saclay, Hewlett Packard Laboratories and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[7] He is an associate (area) editor of the Journal of the ACM[8] and is the co-author of several books, including "Algorithms for Concurrent Systems",[9] "Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming"[10] and "Principles of Transactional Memory".[11] He won an ERC Advanced Grant Award (2013)[12] and the Google Focused Award (2014).[13]

With his co-workers, Guerraoui received Best Paper Awards at the following scientific conferences: ACM Middleware (2016, 2014, 2012), ICDCN (2011), Eurosys (2010), DISC (2010) and OPODIS (2006).[2] He also received the 10-Year Best Paper Award at Middleware 2014,[14]

Beyond his scientific and academic work, Guerraoui works on the popularization of computer science. He co-initiated the Wandida teaching project on YouTube, a library of 300+ videos on computer science and mathematics with 2.5 million views and over 25 thousand subscribers, as well as the Zettabytes education project, a library of videos related to introducing major computer science discoveries and open problems to the general public.

Rachid maintains strong ties to Morocco through his participation in the public debate and the Moroccan political life.[15] In December 2019, he was appointed by King Mohammed VI as a member of the Special Committee on Model of Development.[16]

Focal research areas and main publications[edit]

Guerraoui worked on establishing theoretical foundations of Transactional Memory (TM). He co-defined a concept he called opacity,[17] used for establishing correctness of TMs. On the practical side, he co-devised elastic transactions[18] and co-designed SwissTM,[19] a throughput-efficient software transactional memory (STM) as well as a benchmark for TM systems, STMBench7.[20]

Earlier, Guerraoui studied scalable information dissemination methods. His paper on lightweight epidemic broadcast[21] was the first to consider the partial and/or out-of-sync views of different processes in a gossip-based distributed system. This paper, together with Guerraoui's paper on the underlying membership service,[22] gained over 1250 citations combined as of 2018, among which a number of theory papers on the analysis of gossip protocols in realistic settings.[23]

Rachid Guerraoui has a proven record of investigating the foundations of asynchronous distributed computations. For instance, Guerraoui co-established lower bounds for asynchronous gossiping and renaming.[24][25] He further proved fundamental results on the relationships between classical distributed computing problems, such as atomic commitment[26] and consensus, for which he helped close the then open problem of the weakest failure detector for consensus with any number of faults and co-established a new classification of distributed computing problems.[27] Guerraoui further co-defined a general methodology to build highly concurrent asynchronous data structures[28][29] and has shown how asynchrony can help build pseudo-random numbers.[30]

Guerraoui invented the mathematical abstraction of indulgence[31] to precisely capture the essence of asynchronous algorithms of which safety does not depend on timing assumptions, such as Lamport's Paxos or Castro-Liskov's PBFT. Guerraoui used that concept to co-define a general framework for secure and reliable distributed protocols.[32]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "dblp: Rachid Guerraoui". dblp.uni-trier.de. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  2. ^ a b "EPFL - DCL - Rachid GUERRAOUI". lpdwww.epfl.ch. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  3. ^ Walther, Alexandra (2012-12-14). "Prof. Guerraoui and Prof. Sifakis elected as ACM Fellows". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  4. ^ Sayed, Inka (2018-06-15). "Rachid Guerraoui appointed Digital Chair by Collège de France". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ Jmahri, Mustapha (2019-07-23). "Rachid Guerraoui du DHJ au collège de France". Mazagan24 - Portail d'El Jadida (in French). Retrieved 2020-02-14.
  6. ^ "Le passeport suisse et moi. Rachid Guerraoui: "Les policiers m'ont offert un verre de blanc"". Le Temps (in French). 2016-01-07. ISSN 1423-3967. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  7. ^ "Rachid Guerraoui : Biography and current work". people.epfl.ch (in French). Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  8. ^ "ACM JACM". Journal of the ACM. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  9. ^ "Algorithms for Concurrent Systems". www.ppur.org (in French). Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  10. ^ Introduction to Reliable and Secure Distributed Programming | Christian Cachin | Springer. Springer. 2011. ISBN 9783642152597.
  11. ^ Guerraoui, Rachid; Kapałka, Michał (2010). "Principles of Transactional Memory". Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory. 1 (1): 1–193. doi:10.2200/s00253ed1v01y201009dct004. ISSN 2155-1626. S2CID 27967459.
  12. ^ "Guerraoui Wins an ERC Grant". EcoCloud. 2013-09-17. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  13. ^ Madry, Kamila (2013-11-04). "Prof. Rachid Guerraoui received a Google Focused Award". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  14. ^ Walther, Alexandra (2014-12-17). "Middleware 2014 and 10-Years Best Paper Award for Rachid Guerraoui". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  15. ^ "Rachid Guerraoui: "Je n'habite pas le Maroc mais le Maroc m'habite" (REPLAY)". 2M (in French). Retrieved 2020-02-14.
  16. ^ "Composition of Special Committee on Model of Development | MapNews". www.mapnews.ma. Retrieved 2020-02-14.
  17. ^ Guerraoui, Rachid; Kapalka, Michal (2008). "On the correctness of transactional memory". Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming - PPoPP '08. p. 175. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.164.9537. doi:10.1145/1345206.1345233. ISBN 9781595937957. S2CID 1550577.
  18. ^ Felber, Pascal; Gramoli, Vincent; Guerraoui, Rachid (2017). "Elastic transactions". Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. 100: 103–127. doi:10.1016/j.jpdc.2016.10.010.
  19. ^ Dragojevik, Aleksandar; Felber, Pascal; Gramoli, Vincent; Guerraoui, Rachid (2011). "Why STM can be more than a research toy". Communications of the ACM. 54 (4): 70. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.164.8994. doi:10.1145/1924421.1924440. S2CID 12568524.
  20. ^ Guerraoui, Rachid; Kapalka, Michal; Vitek, Jan (2007). "STMBench7". ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. 41 (3): 315. doi:10.1145/1272998.1273029.
  21. ^ Eugster, P. Th.; Guerraoui, R.; Handurukande, S. B.; Kouznetsov, P.; Kermarrec, A.-M. (2003). "Lightweight probabilistic broadcast". ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 21 (4): 341–374. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.100.9532. doi:10.1145/945506.945507. S2CID 6875620.
  22. ^ Jelasity, Márk; Voulgaris, Spyros; Guerraoui, Rachid; Kermarrec, Anne-Marie; Van Steen, Maarten (2007). "Gossip-based peer sampling". ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 25 (3): 8–es. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.310.501. doi:10.1145/1275517.1275520. S2CID 6266183.
  23. ^ "rachid guerraoui - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2018-10-22.
  24. ^ Georgiou, Chryssis; Gilbert, Seth; Guerraoui, Rachid; Kowalski, Dariusz R. (2013). "Asynchronous gossip". Journal of the ACM. 60 (2): 1–42. doi:10.1145/2450142.2450147. S2CID 7901743.
  25. ^ Alistarh, Dan; Aspnes, James; Censor-Hillel, Keren; Gilbert, Seth; Guerraoui, Rachid (2014). "Tight Bounds for Asynchronous Renaming". Journal of the ACM. 61 (3): 1–51. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.431.2007. doi:10.1145/2597630. S2CID 9813419.
  26. ^ Guerraoui, Rachid (2002). "Non-blocking atomic commit in asynchronous distributed systems with failure detectors". Distributed Computing. 15: 17–25. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.19.5491. doi:10.1007/s446-002-8027-4. S2CID 72867.
  27. ^ Fauconnier, Carole Delporte-Gallet Hugues; Guerraoui, Rachid (2010). "Tight failure detection bounds on atomic object implementations". Journal of the ACM. 57 (4): 1–32. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.165.8950. doi:10.1145/1734213.1734216. S2CID 11566298.
  28. ^ David, Tudor; Guerraoui, Rachid; Trigonakis, Vasileios (2013). "Everything you always wanted to know about synchronization but were afraid to ask". Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles - SOSP '13. pp. 33–48. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.593.2182. doi:10.1145/2517349.2522714. ISBN 9781450323888. S2CID 10176747.
  29. ^ David, Tudor; Guerraoui, Rachid; Trigonakis, Vasileios (2015). "Asynchronized Concurrency". ACM SIGPLAN Notices. 50 (4): 631–644. doi:10.1145/2775054.2694359.
  30. ^ Antoniadis, Karolos; Blanchard, Peva; Guerraoui, Rachid; Stainer, Julien (2018). "The entropy of a distributed computation random number generation from memory interleaving". Distributed Computing. 31 (5): 389–417. doi:10.1007/s00446-017-0311-5. S2CID 24299793.
  31. ^ Guerraoui, Rachid (2000). "Indulgent algorithms (preliminary version)". Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing - PODC '00. pp. 289–297. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.583.6812. doi:10.1145/343477.343630. ISBN 978-1581131833. S2CID 16791929.
  32. ^ Aublin, Pierre-Louis; Guerraoui, Rachid; Knežević, Nikola; Quéma, Vivien; Vukolić, Marko (2015). "The Next 700 BFT Protocols". ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 32 (4): 1–45. doi:10.1145/2658994. S2CID 900359.