A decentralized application is constituted from independently-constructed software agents that represent autonomous principals. An outstanding challenge in distributed systems is how to coordinate the agents so that they can realize application meaning (the computations envisaged by the users of the application) but without relying on ordering mechanisms fixed in the application's infrastructure. Forget causal delivery, even TCP is out!

He will introduce Mandrake, a programming model for decentralized applications that tackles this challenge. Specifically, He will introduce the idea of specifying an application as an information protocol and then show how to construct protocol-compliant agents that communicate via UDP and can deal with transient failures that manifest as message loss.

He will discuss Mandrake in the context of important systems ideas such as the end-to-end argument and why it achieves some of the goals of the founders of networked computing.

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Amit K. Chopra is a senior lecturer at Lancaster University. He is interested in abstractions and methodologies for engineering decentralized applications of autonomous parties.