HyperDex: A Consistent, Fault-tolerant, Searchable NoSQL Store

Abstract: Distributed key-value stores are now a standard component of high-performance web services and cloud computing applications. While key-value stores offer significent performance and scalability advantages, the first wave of NoSQL stores typically compromise on consistency and limit the system API to key-based operations.

This talk will present HyperDex, a novel distributed key-value store developed by my group that provides (1) strong consistency guarantees, (2) fault-tolerance for failures and partitions affecting up to f nodes, and (3) a rich API which includes a unique search primitive that enables queries on secondary attributes. HyperDex achieves these properties through the combination of two recent technical advances called hyperspace hashing and value-dependent chaining. Performance measurements from the industry-standard YCSB benchmark show that these properties do not extract a high overhead: HyperDex is actually a factor of 2-13 faster than Cassandra and MongoDB.

Overall, HyperDex offers a rich API and combines strong consistency with fault-tolerance guarantees. We'll discuss hyperspace hashing and value-dependent chaining and outline how these properties relate to the CAP theorem.

Bio: Emin Gun Sirer is an Associate Professor at Cornell University whose research interests span Big Data infrastructure, distributed systems, networking and operating systems. His recent work includes the Nexus operating system for trustworthy computing, content distribution networks, and innovative datacenter topologies.