Peter Alvaro

I am a computer science PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, working with Joe Hellerstein and the BOOM team. My research interests lie at the intersection of databases, distributed systems and programming languages: in particular, I want to know how the lessons from the first may be incorporated into the third, and to what degree this mitigates the difficulties of the second. To this end, my team is designing a collection of declarative languages for specifying and implementing complex distributed systems in a data-centric manner.

Curriculum Vitae

Publications

[Google Scholar] [DBLP]

Consistency without borders.
Peter Alvaro, Peter Bailis, Neil Conway, Joseph M. Hellerstein.
To appear in SoCC 2013.

Blazes: Coordination analysis for distributed programs.
Peter Alvaro, Neil Conway, Joseph M. Hellerstein, David Maier.
In submission.

Logic and Lattices for Distributed Programming.
Neil Conway, William R. Marczak, Peter Alvaro, Joseph M. Hellerstein, David Maier.
Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC) 2012.

BloomUnit: Declarative Testing for Distributed Programs.
Peter Alvaro, Andrew Hutchinson, Neil Conway, William R. Marczak, Joseph M. Hellerstein.
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Testing Database Systems (DBTest) 2012.

A Declarative Semantics for Dedalus.
Peter Alvaro, Tom J. Ameloot, Joseph M. Hellerstein, William Marczak and Jan Van den Bussche.
In submission.

Confluence Analysis for Distributed Programs: A Model-Theoretic Approach.
William R. Marczak, Peter Alvaro, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Neil Conway.
Datalog2.0 Workshop 2012.

Consistency Analysis in Bloom: a CALM and Collected Approach.
Peter Alvaro, Neil Conway, Joseph M. Hellerstein, William R. Marczak.
Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR) 2011.

FATE and DESTINI: A Framework for Cloud Recovery Testing.
Haryadi S. Gunawi, Thanh Do, Pallavi Joshi, Peter Alvaro, Joseph M. Hellerstein,
Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau, Koushik Sen and Dhruba Borthakur.
Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) 2011.

Dedalus: Datalog in Time and Space.
Peter Alvaro, William R. Marczak, Neil Conway, Joseph M. Hellerstein, David Maier, Russell Sears.
Proceedings of the Datalog Reloaded Workshop, Oxford, 2010.
M.S. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, May 2010.

BOOM Analytics: Exploring Data-Centric, Declarative Programming for the Cloud.
Peter Alvaro, Tyson Condie, Neil Conway, Khaled Elmeleegy, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Russell C. Sears.
Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys) 2010.

MapReduce Online.
Tyson Condie, Neil Conway, Peter Alvaro, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Khaled Elmeleegy, Russell Sears.
Proceedings of the 7th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI) 2010.

I Do Declare: Consensus in a Logic Language.
Peter Alvaro, Tyson Condie, Neil Conway, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Russell C. Sears.
Proceedings of the SOSP Workshop on Networking Meets Databases (NetDB) 2009.

BOOM: Data-Centric Programming in the Datacenter.
Peter Alvaro, Tyson Condie, Neil Conway, Khaled Elmeleegy, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Russell C. Sears.
UC Berkeley Technical Report No. UCB/EECS-2009-98 2009.

Knuckles: Bringing the Database to the Data.
Peter Alvaro, Dmitriy Ryaboy, Divy Agrawal.
International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering (IJCSE) 2010, Vol. 5.

Towards Scaleable Architectures for Clickstream Data Warehousing.
Peter Alvaro, Dmitriy Ryaboy, Divy Agrawal.
Databases in Networked Information Systems: 5th Intl. Workshop Proceedings (DNIS) 2007.

Talks

ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing, October 3, 2013: Consistency without borders. [on slideshare]
Stanford, April 17th, 2013. Bloom and CALM: Programming the cloud. [Slides, Demo]
UCLA, March 6, 2013: Disorderly Distributed Programming with Dedalus and Bloom
5th International SIGMOD Workshop on Testing Database Systems, May 21, 2012: BloomUnit: Declarative testing for distributed programs (pdf)
lang.next, April 3, 2012: Bloom: disorderly programming for a distributed world (pdf, video)
Ask.com, March 31, 2011 and Berkeley Cloud Computing Seminar, April 11, 2011: Bloom: disorderly programming. CALM analysis.
Twitter, January 18, 2011: Bloom: CALMly building skyscrapers on quicksand
MIT, November 19, 2010: Show and Tell: Building a consistent, replicated shopping cart in bloom
Berkeley OSQ Retreat, May 2010: I Do Declare: Consensus in a Logic Language
SOSP Workshop on Networking Meets Databases, October 14, 2009: I Do Declare
Stanford Infolunch, April 17th, 2009: BOOM: Data-Centric Programming For The Data Center

Teaching

Instructor. cs194-17 - Programming the Cloud. Spring 2013.
Instructor. cs194-17 - Programming the Cloud. Fall 2011. [Archive]
Guest lecturer. cs262a - Advanced topics in computer systems. Fall 2010. [A disorderly defense of disorderly programming]
Graduate Student Instructor (TA). CS186 - Introduction to Database Systems. Spring 2009.

Press

Javascript the evil parts -- you can't maintain it[sic]. I Programmer, 6/6/2012.
Is It Time for JavaScript to Step Aside for the Next Big 'Web' Thing?. Eweek, 4/3/2012.

Dioramae & c.

P. Alvaro, A. Hutchinson, N. Conway, W.R. Marczak, J.M. Hellerstein. BloomUnit: declarative testing for distributed systems.
T. Condie, N. Conway, P. Alvaro, J. M. Hellerstein, J. Gerth, J. Talbot, K. Elmeleegy, R. Sears. Online Aggregation and Continuous Query support in MapReduce. SIGMOD 2010 (Demo Track).
Radlab retreat, June 2009: What the Thunder Said

Aliases

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, CPAN, github