Astor Lecture: Rethinking Distributed Systems for Efficiency

Astor Lecture: Rethinking Distributed Systems for Efficiency

Speaker: Professor Robert Soulé, Yale University

About the Lecture

We are delighted to welcome Professor Robert Soulé from Yale University for an Astor Lecture entitled Rethinking Distributed Systems for Efficiency.

Much of distributed systems research over the past few decades has focused on questions of scale, i.e., how we can do more with more. Often lost in this focus on scale, however, has been an examination of efficiency, i.e., how to do more with less.  Focusing on efficiency is important because it reduces operational bloat, decreases financial pressures, and can result in sustainable designs that diminish environmental impact.

In this talk, I present three systems that are designed to make distributed systems more efficient. The first step in improving efficiency is measurement. First, I discuss a novel approach to telemetry that embeds an SQL query engine directly into an operating system kernel. Second, I present a software/hardware co-design that improves communication performance while maintaining POSIX-standard APIs. Finally, I discuss three key observations on how synchronous consensus protocols, which offer clear advantages over other protocols in terms of resource consumption, can be made practical for public cloud environments.

About The speaker

Robert Soulé is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Yale University and a Principal Visiting Professor at Cerebras Systems. He received his B.A. from Brown University, and his Ph.D. from NYU. After his Ph.D., he was a post-doc at Cornell University. He serves as Editor of SIGCOMM Computer Communications Review. He is a Distinguished Member of the ACM and a Senior Member of the IEEE. His work has received several awards, including best paper awards at ACM DEBS 2012, NSDI 2018, and CoNEXT 2020; the 2019 SIGMETRICS Highlights Beyond Sigmetrics; and the 2025 SIGCOMM Networking Systems Award.

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