Title:   Efficient Protocols for Remote File Synchronization
Speaker:  Torsten Suel,  Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, NY

Date: Friday,  March 31, 2006
Time 11-12 
Venue: Room 3530 , HKUST   

  
Abstract:

Given two versions of a file, a current version located on one machine and an
outdated version known only to another machine, the remote file synchronization
problem is how to update the outdated version over a network with a minimal
amount of communication. In particular, when the versions are very similar, the
total data transmitted should be significantly smaller than the file size.
File synchronization problems arise in many application scenarios such as web
site mirroring, file system backup and replication, storage networks, and web
access over slow links. An open source tool for this problem, called rsync and
included in many Linux distributions, is widely used.

In this talk, we first give an overview of file synchronization and related
problems, and then describe recent work on protocols that achieve significant
reductions in bandwidth use over rsync. In particular, we focus on two results,
an optimized multi-round protocol and a protocols that, like rsync, use only 
a single round of communication. The talk will be self-contained, with a broad
introduction, a few recent results, and several open problems. This will be a 
hybrid theory/systems talk, touching on theoretical, experimental, and systems
aspects.
 
* Joint work with Utku Irmak, Svilen Mihaylov, Patrick Noel, and 
  Dimitre Trendafilov