Rachid Guerraoui Explained

Birth Date:5 January 1967
Birth Place:Rabat, Morocco
Citizenship:Morocco, Switzerland
Fields:Computer science
Workplaces:EPFL, HP Labs
Alma Mater:
Thesis Title:Programmation Répartie par Objets : Études et Propositions
Thesis Year:1992
Doctoral Advisor:Christian Fluhr
Known For:distributed computing, concurrent computing, popular science
Awards:

Rachid Guerraoui (born January 5, 1967) is a Moroccan-Swiss-French [1] computer scientist and a Full Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL, known for his contributions in the fields of concurrent and distributed computing.[2] [3] He is an ACM Fellow and an associate (area) editor of the Journal of the ACM.[4] In 2018–19, he held the position of Chair in Informatics and Computational Science for Distributed Computing at the Collège de France.

Education and career

Guerraoui 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. Guerraoui earned simultaneous Master’s degrees in Computer Engineering from the École supérieure d'informatique électronique automatique (ESIEA) and in Computer Science from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1989, supported by a scholarship at the Centre de Recherche of the École des Mines of Paris. In 1992, he earned his PhD from the Université d’Orsay, advised by Christian Fluhr and supported by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission of Saclay. His doctoral dissertation was titled Programmation Répartie par Objets : Études et Propositions.[5] He then started as a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL and was appointed to the computer science faculty in 1999, after stints at HP Labs and MIT.[6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

Guerraoui's honors include an ERC Advanced Grant Award (2013),[12] the Google Focused Award (2014),[13] the Middleware 2014 Best Paper and 10-Years Best Paper Awards,[14] and the Dahl–Nygaard Senior Prize (2024).[15] He was named an ACM Fellow in 2012[16] and was appointed Chair in Informatics and Computational Science for Distributed Computing, 2018–2019, by the Collège de France[17] —the first Moroccan to receive either appointment.

With various collaborators, Guerraoui has written several technical and general-audience books:

He is also an associate (area) editor of the Journal of the ACM.

Guerraoui also works on the popularization of computer science. With his doctoral student El Mahdi El Mahmdi, he created the Wandida project, a collection of permissively licensed educational videos on YouTube.[18]

Guerraoui maintains strong ties to Morocco through his participation in the public debate and the Moroccan political life.[19] In December 2019, he was appointed by King Mohammed VI as a member of the Special Committee on Model of Development.[20]

Focal research areas and main publications

Guerraoui worked on establishing theoretical foundations of Transactional Memory (TM). He co-defined a concept he called opacity,[21] used for establishing correctness of TMs. On the practical side, he co-devised elastic transactions[22] and co-designed SwissTM,[23] a throughput-efficient software transactional memory (STM) as well as a benchmark for TM systems, STMBench7.[24]

Earlier, Guerraoui studied scalable information dissemination methods. His paper on lightweight epidemic broadcast[25] 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,[26] gained over 1250 citations combined as of 2018, among which a number of theory papers on the analysis of gossip protocols in realistic settings.[27]

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.[28] [29] He further proved fundamental results on the relationships between classical distributed computing problems, such as atomic commitment[30] 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.[31] Guerraoui further co-defined a general methodology to build highly concurrent asynchronous data structures[32] [33] and has shown how asynchrony can help build pseudo-random numbers.[34]

Guerraoui invented the mathematical abstraction of indulgence[35] 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.[36]

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Rachid Guerraoui, EPFL profil.
  2. Web site: dblp: Rachid Guerraoui. dblp.uni-trier.de. 2018-10-22.
  3. Web site: EPFL - DCL - Rachid GUERRAOUI. lpdwww.epfl.ch. 2018-10-22.
  4. Web site: ACM JACM. Journal of the ACM. 2024-10-04.
  5. Web site: Rachid Guerraoui . Mathematics Genealogy Project . 4 October 2024.
  6. Web site: Rachid Guerraoui : Biography and current work. EPFL . 2018-10-22.
  7. Web site: Jmahri. Mustapha. 2019-07-23. Rachid Guerraoui du DHJ au collège de France. 2020-02-14. Mazagan24 - Portail d'El Jadida. fr-FR.
  8. News: 2016-01-07. Le passeport suisse et moi. Rachid Guerraoui: 'Les policiers m'ont offert un verre de blanc'. fr. Le Temps. 2020-09-14. 1423-3967.
  9. News: Jérémie . David . PORTRAIT. Rachid Guerraoui, éminent professeur à l'Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, détenteur d'une chaire au collège de France . 4 October 2024 . Challenge . 29 Jul 2023 . https://web.archive.org/web/20230927025507/https://www.challenge.ma/portrait-rachid-guerraoui-eminent-professeur-a-lecole-polytechnique-de-lausanne-detenteur-dune-chaire-au-college-de-france-265066/ . 2023-09-27 . fr.
  10. News: El Bouzdaini . Wissam . Rachid Guerraoui, sommité du domaine informatique . 4 October 2024 . Maroc Hebdo . 26 Jun 2018 . https://web.archive.org/web/20180815035548/https://www.maroc-hebdo.press.ma/rachid-guerraoui-sommite-domaine-informatique/ . 2018-08-15 . fr.
  11. Web site: Guerraoui . Rachid . CV . Rachid GUERRAOUI . DCL, EPFL . 4 October 2024.
  12. News: Guerraoui Wins an ERC Grant. 2013-09-17. EcoCloud. 2018-10-22.
  13. Madry. Kamila. 2013-11-04. Prof. Rachid Guerraoui received a Google Focused Award. EPFL. Lausanne, Switzerland.
  14. Walther. Alexandra. 2014-12-17. Middleware 2014 and 10-Years Best Paper Award for Rachid Guerraoui. EPFL. Lausanne, Switzerland.
  15. Web site: Technical papers . ECOOP 2024 . 4 October 2024.
  16. Web site: Award recipients . Association for Computing Machinery . 4 October 2024.
  17. Sayed. Inka. 2018-06-15. Rachid Guerraoui appointed Digital Chair by Collège de France. EPFL. Lausanne, Switzerland.
  18. News: Kazar . Yassir . Online education : Wandida, this is not a MOOC . 1 October 2024 . Open Knowledge Foundation . 2014-05-08 . https://web.archive.org/web/20240829163806/https://ma.okfn.org/2014/05/08/online-education-wandida-this-is-not-a-mooc/index.html . 2024-08-29.
  19. Web site: Rachid Guerraoui: "Je n'habite pas le Maroc mais le Maroc m'habite" (REPLAY). 2020-02-14. 2M. fr.
  20. News: Composition of Special Committee on Model of Development. 2019-12-12. Agence Marocaine de Presse. Rabat. 2020-02-14. www.mapnews.ma.
  21. Book: 10.1145/1345206.1345233 . On the correctness of transactional memory . Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming - PPoPP '08 . 175 . 2008 . Guerraoui . Rachid . Kapałka . Michał . 9781595937957 . 10.1.1.164.9537 . 1550577 .
  22. 10.1016/j.jpdc.2016.10.010 . Elastic transactions . Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing . 100 . 103–127 . 2017 . Felber . Pascal . Gramoli . Vincent . Guerraoui . Rachid .
  23. 10.1145/1924421.1924440 . Why STM can be more than a research toy . Communications of the ACM . 54 . 4 . 70 . 2011 . Dragojevik . Aleksandar . Felber . Pascal . Gramoli . Vincent . Guerraoui . Rachid . 10.1.1.164.8994 . 12568524 .
  24. 10.1145/1272998.1273029 . STMBench7 . ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review . 41 . 3 . 315 . 2007 . Guerraoui . Rachid . Kapałka . Michał . Vitek . Jan .
  25. 10.1145/945506.945507 . Lightweight probabilistic broadcast . ACM Transactions on Computer Systems . 21 . 4 . 341–374 . 2003 . Eugster . P. Th. . Guerraoui . R. . Handurukande . S. B. . Kouznetsov . P. . Kermarrec . A.-M. . 10.1.1.100.9532 . 6875620 .
  26. 10.1145/1275517.1275520 . Gossip-based peer sampling . ACM Transactions on Computer Systems . 25 . 3 . 8–es . 2007 . Jelasity . Márk . Voulgaris . Spyros . Guerraoui . Rachid . Kermarrec . Anne-Marie . Van Steen . Maarten . 10.1.1.310.501 . 6266183 .
  27. Web site: rachid guerraoui - Google Scholar Citations. scholar.google.com. 2018-10-22.
  28. 10.1145/2450142.2450147 . Asynchronous gossip . Journal of the ACM . 60 . 2 . 1–42 . 2013 . Georgiou . Chryssis . Gilbert . Seth . Guerraoui . Rachid . Kowalski . Dariusz R. . 7901743 .
  29. 10.1145/2597630 . Tight Bounds for Asynchronous Renaming . Journal of the ACM . 61 . 3 . 1–51 . 2014 . Alistarh . Dan . Aspnes . James . Censor-Hillel . Keren . Gilbert . Seth . Guerraoui . Rachid . 10.1.1.431.2007 . 9813419 .
  30. 10.1007/s446-002-8027-4 . Non-blocking atomic commit in asynchronous distributed systems with failure detectors . Distributed Computing . 15 . 17–25 . 2002 . Guerraoui . Rachid . 10.1.1.19.5491 . 72867 .
  31. 10.1145/1734213.1734216 . Tight failure detection bounds on atomic object implementations . Journal of the ACM . 57 . 4 . 1–32 . 2010 . Fauconnier . Carole Delporte-Gallet Hugues . Guerraoui . Rachid . 10.1.1.165.8950 . 11566298 .
  32. Book: 10.1145/2517349.2522714 . 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 . 33–48 . 2013 . David . Tudor . Guerraoui . Rachid . Trigonakis . Vasileios . 9781450323888 . 10.1.1.593.2182 . 10176747 .
  33. 10.1145/2775054.2694359 . Asynchronized Concurrency . ACM SIGPLAN Notices . 50 . 4 . 631–644 . 2015 . David . Tudor . Guerraoui . Rachid . Trigonakis . Vasileios . free .
  34. 10.1007/s00446-017-0311-5 . The entropy of a distributed computation random number generation from memory interleaving . Distributed Computing . 31 . 5 . 389–417 . 2018 . Antoniadis . Karolos . Blanchard . Peva . Guerraoui . Rachid . Stainer . Julien . 24299793 .
  35. Book: 10.1145/343477.343630 . Indulgent algorithms (preliminary version) . Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing - PODC '00 . 289–297 . 2000 . Guerraoui . Rachid . 978-1581131833 . 10.1.1.583.6812 . 16791929 .
  36. 10.1145/2658994 . The Next 700 BFT Protocols . ACM Transactions on Computer Systems . 32 . 4 . 1–45 . 2015 . Aublin . Pierre-Louis . Guerraoui . Rachid . Knežević . Nikola . Quéma . Vivien . Vukolić . Marko . 900359 .

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