Alysson Bessani, integrated member and director of LASIGE, was invited to speak at OPODIS 2024, the Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems and one of the top three in the area of distributed algorithms, which took place from 11 to 13 December 2024 in Lucca, Italy.

His talk was entitled: “The Power of Simplicity on Dependable Distributed Systems” and presented some cases in which simple protocols and elegant abstractions – which were not the most efficient for the problem at hand – enabled the deployment of dependable solutions that changed the practice of distributed computing. He also discussed how the quest for simplicity influenced his work on BFT and multi-cloud storage. And, ultimately, Alysson aimed to convince the audience that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” in distributed computing.

OPODIS’24 is an open forum for the exchange of state-of-the-art knowledge concerning distributed computing and distributed computer systems. All aspects of distributed systems are within the scope of OPODIS, including theory, specification, design, performance, and system building.