Michel Raynal Explained

Michel Raynal[1] (born 1949) is a French informatics scientist, professor at IRISA, University of Rennes, France. He is known for his contributions in the fields of algorithms, computability, and fault-tolerance in the context of concurrent and distributed systems. Michel Raynal is also Distinguished Chair professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University[2] and editor of the “Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory” published by Morgan & Claypool.[3] He is a senior member of Institut Universitaire de France and a member of Academia Europaea.

Michel Raynal co-authored numerous research papers[4] [5] on concurrent and distributed computing, and has written 12 books. His last three books[6] [7] [8] constitute an introduction to fault-free and fault-tolerant concurrent and distributed computing.In his publications Michel Raynal strives to promote simplicity as a “first-class citizen” in the scientific approach.[9] Michel Raynal (and his co-authors) won several best paper awards in prestigious conferences such as IEEE ICDCS 1999, 2000 and 2001, SSS 2009 and 2011, Europar 2010, DISC 2010, and ACM PODC 2014.

When Michel Raynal became Emeritus professor (2017), INRIA, IRISA and the University of Rennes organized a Workshop[10] in his honor featuring various speakers, including Turing Award recipient (Leslie Lamport) and Dijkstra Prize recipients (Leslie Lamport, Maurice Herlihy, Yoram Moses), and professor at Collège de France (Rachid Guerraoui).

Education and career

Michel Raynal obtained bachelor degrees (French “Baccalauréat”) both in literature and science. He received his PhD from University of Rennes in 1975, and his “Doctorat d’état” in 1981. During the period 1981-1984 he was a professor in a telecommunications engineer school (ENST de Bretagne) where he created and managed the informatics department. In 1984 he moved to the university of Rennes, and in 1985 he founded a research group entirely devoted to Distributed Algorithms (at that time, one of the first groups on this research topic in the world).

Michel Raynal has been an associate member of the editorial board of international journals, including the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC), IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), and IEEE Transactions of parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), among others.

Research areas and scientific interests

Michel Raynal’s research contributions concern mainly concurrent and distributed computing, and more specifically: causality, distributed synchronization, fault-tolerance, distributed agreement (consensus) and distributed computability. His first book (on mutual exclusion algorithms in both shared memory and message-passing systems)[11] is recognized as one of the first books entirely devoted to distributed algorithms.

On the synchronization side, with Jean-Michel Hélary and Achour Mostéfaoui, Michel Raynal designed a very simple generic message-passing mutual exclusion algorithm from which can be derived plenty of token and tree-based mutex algorithms.[12]

On the causality side, with co-workers he produced a very simple algorithm for causal message delivery,[13] and an optimal vector-clock-based distributed checkpointing algorithms,[14] which established the theoretical foundations of distributed checkpointing,[15] and the so-called communication-based snapshot.[16] He also introduced (with Hélary and Mostéfaoui) the notion of virtual precedence.[17] Together with V. Garg, he introduced the concept of “normality” which extendsthe well-known linearizability consistency condition to the case where objects have polyadic operations.[18]

On the agreement side, Michel Raynal (mainly with A. Mostéfaoui) produced several algorithms for asynchronous message-passing systems which solve consensus in the presence of crash failures[19] [20] [21] or process Byzantine failures.[22] This last algorithm is an incredibly simple randomized algorithm that is optimal with respect to both time and message complexities. With Mostéfaoui and Rajsbaum, Michel Raynal also introduced a new approach to solve consensus called “condition-based”.[23] This approach brought to light a very strong connection between error-correcting codes and distributed agreement problems.[24] Michel Raynal also designed distributed algorithms for other agreement problems (such as k-set agreement and renaming).

Recently, Armando Castaneda, Sergio Rajsbaum, and Michel Raynal introduced the notion of “interval linearizability” which is the first notion that allows us to unify in a single framework the notions of “concurrent objects” and “distributed tasks”.[25]

On the computability side, Stainer, Taubenfeld, and Raynal addressed universal constructions that allow x out of k distributed state machines to progress in the presence of asynchrony and any number of process crashes.[26] Recently, from an initial idea proposed by Taubenfeld, Michel Raynal became interested in algorithms suited to anonymous memories.[27]

Awards and honours

Notes and References

  1. http://www.irisa.fr/prive/raynal/ Michel Raynal's personal page
  2. Web site: Home.
  3. Web site: Synthesis Lectures on Distributed Computing Theory.
  4. http://dblp.uni-trier.de/pers/hd/r/Raynal:Michel Michel Raynal's bibliography
  5. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=d3BBqmgAAAAJ Michel Raynal's bibliography
  6. Book: Raynal . Michel . Concurrent Programming: Algorithms, Principles, and Foundations . 2012 . Springer . 978-3-642-32027-9 . 10.1007/978-3-642-32027-9 . 10526009 .
  7. Book: Raynal . Michel . Distributed algorithms for message-passing systems . 2013 . Berlin, Heidelberg . Springer . 978-3-642-38123-2 . 10.1007/978-3-642-38123-2 . 31644113 .
  8. Book: Raynal . Michel . Fault-tolerant message-passing distributed systems: an algorithmic approach . 2018 . Springer . 978-3-319-94141-7 . 10.1007/978-3-319-94141-7 . 52175582 .
  9. Web site: Le Bonheur . Julien . Michel Raynal distingué pour sa contribution exceptionnelle à l'algorithmique répartie . Université de Rennes 1 . 13 January 2020 . French. 2018-07-16 .
  10. Web site: International Workshop on Distributed Computing in the honor of Michel Raynal . Inria . 21 December 2019.
  11. Book: Raynal . Michel . Algorithms for mutual exclusion . 1986 . 1984 . MIT Press . Cambridge . 0-262-18119-3.
  12. Hélary . Jean-Michel . Mostéfaoui . Achour . Raynal . Michel . A general scheme for token- and tree-based distributed mutual exclusion algorithms . IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems . November 1994 . 5 . 11 . 1185–1196 . 10.1109/71.329670 . 2161-9883.
  13. Raynal . Michel . Schiper . André . Toueg . Sam . The causal ordering abstraction and a simple way to implement it . Information Processing Letters . September 1991 . 39 . 6 . 343–350 . 10.1016/0020-0190(91)90008-6.
  14. Baldoni . Roberto . Hélary . Jean-Michel . Raynal . Michel . Rollback-Dependency Trackability: A Minimal Characterization and Its Protocol . Information and Computation . March 2001 . 165 . 2 . 144–173 . 10.1006/inco.2000.2906. free .
  15. Hélary . J.-M. . Mostefaoui . A. . Netzer . R.H.B. . Raynal . M. . Communication-based prevention of useless checkpoints in distributed computations . Distributed Computing . 1 January 2000 . 13 . 1 . 29–43 . 10.1007/s004460050003. 6554750 .
  16. Helary . J. . Mostefaoui . A. . Raynal . M. . Communication-induced determination of consistent snapshots . IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems . 1999 . 10 . 9 . 865–877 . 10.1109/71.798312. 13939609 .
  17. Hélary . J.M. . Mostefaoui . A. . Raynal . M. . Interval Consistency of Asynchronous Distributed Computations . Journal of Computer and System Sciences . March 2002 . 64 . 2 . 329–349 . 10.1006/jcss.2001.1819. free .
  18. GARG . VIJAY K. . RAYNAL . MICHEL . Normality: A CONSISTENCY CONDITION FOR CONCURRENT OBJECTS . Parallel Processing Letters . 21 November 2011 . 09 . 1 . 123–134 . 10.1142/S0129626499000141. 16427772 .
  19. MOSTEFAOUI . A. . Leader-Based Consensus . RAYNAL . M. . Parallel Processing Letters . 21 November 2011 . 11 . 1 . 95–107 . 10.1142/S0129626401000452.
  20. Guerraoui . R. . Raynal . M. . The Alpha of Indulgent Consensus . The Computer Journal . 16 October 2006 . 50 . 1 . 53–67 . 10.1093/comjnl/bxl046.
  21. Mostefaoui . Achour . Rajsbaum . Sergio . Raynal . Michel . Travers . Corentin . The Combined Power of Conditions and Information on Failures to Solve Asynchronous Set Agreement . SIAM Journal on Computing . January 2008 . 38 . 4 . 1574–1601 . 10.1137/050645580. 12886589 . 10.1.1.405.4702 .
  22. Mostéfaoui . Achour . Moumen . Hamouma . Raynal . Michel . Signature-Free Asynchronous Binary Byzantine Consensus with t < n/3, O(n2) Messages, and O(1) Expected Time . Journal of the ACM . 11 September 2015 . 62 . 4 . 1–21 . 10.1145/2785953. 2212421 .
  23. Mostefaoui . Achour . Rajsbaum . Sergio . Raynal . Michel . Conditions on input vectors for consensus solvability in asynchronous distributed systems . Journal of the ACM . 1 November 2003 . 50 . 6 . 922–954 . 10.1145/950620.950624.
  24. Friedman . Roy . Mostefaoui . Achour . Rajsbaum . Sergio . Raynal . Michel . Asynchronous Agreement and Its Relation with Error-Correcting Codes . IEEE Transactions on Computers . July 2007 . 56 . 7 . 865–875 . 10.1109/TC.2007.1043. 9418243 .
  25. Castañeda . Armando . Rajsbaum . Sergio . Raynal . Michel . Unifying Concurrent Objects and Distributed Tasks . Journal of the ACM . 19 November 2018 . 65 . 6 . 1–42 . 10.1145/3266457. 53877441 .
  26. Raynal . Michel . Stainer . Julien . Taubenfeld . Gadi . Distributed Universality . Algorithmica . 19 August 2015 . 76 . 2 . 502–535 . 10.1007/s00453-015-0053-3. 10912125 .
  27. Raynal . Michel . Taubenfeld . Gadi . Mutual exclusion in fully anonymous shared memory systems . 2019.
  28. http://iuf.amue.fr/author/mraynal/ Michel Raynal's page
  29. Web site: SIROCCO 2015 website . 2015-03-10 . https://web.archive.org/web/20151127003304/http://sirocco2015.cs.upb.de/keynotes.html . 2015-11-27 . dead .
  30. http://www.ae-info.org/ae/User/Raynal_Michel Michel Raynal's page
  31. Web site: Michel Raynal distingué pour sa contribution exceptionnelle à l'algorithme répartie. Université de Rennes 1. July 2018.
  32. Web site: Le Bonheur . Julien . Michel Raynal distingué pour sa contribution exceptionnelle à l'algorithmique répartie . Université de Rennes 1 . 13 January 2020 . fr . 16 July 2018.

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