Alexander Thomson

Department of Computer Science
Yale University

51 Prospect Street, #212
New Haven, CT 06511

thomson at cs dot yale dot edu

I'm a fourth-year PhD student in computer science at Yale University. I received my BS in computer science from Yale College in 2009.

Research

My primary research interest is in distributed data management. I am advised by Daniel Abadi, and I currently lead the Calvin project. Calvin is a distributed database system prototype designed to achieve high OLTP throughput without compromising support for distributed transactions—while also providing strongly consistent WAN replication.

Past projects include work in software verification with the Coq proof assistant and Hamster Balls—a multiplayer first-person shooter that has the distinction be being both the first 3D game and the first network game ever implemented entirely in Haskell.

Publications

Modularity and Scalability in Calvin
Alexander Thomson and Daniel J. Abadi. In IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, June 2013. (pdf)

Lightweight Locking for Main Memory Database Systems
Kun Ren, Alexander Thomson, and Daniel J. Abadi. In VLDB, 2013. (pdf)

Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems
Alexander Thomson, Thaddeus Diamond, Shu-chun Weng, Philip Shao, Kun Ren, and Daniel J. Abadi. In SIGMOD, 2012. (pdf)

Building Deterministic Transaction Processing Systems without Deterministic Thread Scheduling
Alexander Thomson and Daniel J. Abadi. In WoDet, 2011. (pdf)

The Case for Determinism in Database Systems
Alexander Thomson and Daniel J. Abadi. In VLDB, 2010. (pdf)

Personal

On nights and weekends I enjoy Argentine tango, chess, bridge, squash, ping-pong, welding, machining, glassblowing, snowboarding, and unicycling.