ACID: The Wrong Way to Think About Concurrency
Emmett Witchel, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract
Transactions are a concurrency control mechanism that for decades have been defined by the ACID properties of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability.  Recent systems with concurrency control have stressed (e.g., transactional memory) or broken (e.g., NoSQL) the transactional model.  Part of the problem in understanding these new models is that the ACID properties are a confusing jumble.  This talk will argue that a different set of properties focusing on ordering and failures provides a firmer foundation for understanding and designing the next generation of concurrency control systems.

Speaker Bio
Emmett Witchel is an associate professor in computer science at The University of Texas at Austin.  He received his undergraduate degrees from Stanford University and a doctorate from MIT in 2004.  He and his group are interested in operating systems, security, and architecture. Most of his current research is about operating system security, GPU systems, and concurrency.