Colloquium Details
**Special Day/Time/Room: Thurs 5/10 @ 3:30 Rm 101** TAO: How Facebook Serves the Social Graph
Speaker: Harry Li, Facebook
Location: Warren Weaver Hall 101
Date: May 10, 2012, 3:30 p.m.
Host: Jinyang Li
Synopsis:
Over 800 million people around the world share their social interactions with friends on Facebook, providing a rich body of information referred to as the social graph.
In this talk, I describe a new data model to represent this graph. This model uses typed nodes (fbobjects) and edges (assocs) to express the relationships and interactions that happen on Facebook. I also discuss the fbobject/assoc API and how we use it to build News Feed, a feature that allows users to post statuses and comment or like those posts. In the last segment of this talk, I present TAO (the association and object store), a write-through cache that implements the fbobject/assoc API and has been serving production traffic for features like News Feed for over 2 years.
Speaker Bio:
Harry C. Li is the academic lead and an infrastructure engineer at Facebook. He has worked on a variety of distributed systems projects at Facebook, including consistency protocols, replication pipelines, and publish-subscribe systems. Recently, he has been working to define and build Facebook's research and academic initiatives. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from the University of Texas at Austin under the guidance of Lorenzo Alvisi and Mike Dahlin.
Notes:
In-person attendance only available to those with active NYU ID cards.