Welcome to the DistSys Reading Group! Every week we present and discuss one distributed systems paper. We try to focus on relatively new papers, although we occasionally break this rule for some important older publications. The main objective of this group is to share knowledge through discussion. Our participants come from academia and industry and often carry a unique perspective and expertise on the subject matter.

Format

We start each meeting with a short presentation of the paper by one of the group members. We record the presentation and later upload it to YouTube for the general audience. After the presentation, we move into a group discussion of the paper. This part is not on the record to make sure we can speak freely about the topic and the paper. However, I write a moderated discussion summary for each meeting and post it here. All the summaries are available via the “Summary” link next to the paper title. To see the archive of past meetings, scroll down to the “Past Meetings” section below.

Meeting Info

• Meeting Time: Wednesdays at 2:00 PM EST (11 am PST)
• Duration: ~1 hour
• Slack Channel – Join our Slack for Zoom information
• YouTube Channel
• Google Calendar with our schedule.

Current Schedule (Papers ##131-140)

Below is a list of papers for the fall term of the distributed systems reading group.

• Transactions Make Debugging Easy [CIDR’23]
  • Authors: Qian Li, Peter Kraft, Michael Cafarella, Çağatay Demiralp, Goetz Graefe, Christos Kozyrakis, Michael Stonebraker, Lalith Suresh, and Matei Zaharia
  • What: Everything is a database transaction, including debugging
  • When: April 12th

• Perseus: A Fail-Slow Detection Framework for Cloud Storage Systems [FAST’23]
  • Authors: Ruiming Lu, Erci Xu, Yiming Zhang, Xiamen University; Fengyi Zhu, Zhaosheng Zhu, Mengtian Wang, Zongpeng Zhu, Guangtao Xue, Jiwu Shu, Minglu Li, Jiesheng Wu
  • What: Detecting fail-slow failures (i.e., machine/node slowdowns) in storage systems
  • When: April 19th

• Developer’s Responsibility or Database’s Responsibility? Rethinking Concurrency Control in Databases [CIDR’23]
  • Authors: Chaoyi Cheng, Mingzhe Han, Nuo Xu, Spyros Blanas, Michael D. Bond, and Yang Wang
  • What: Study of 93 concurrency bugs in database applications
  • When: April 26th

• SelfTune: Tuning Cluster Managers [NSDI’23]
  • Authors: Ajaykrishna Karthikeyan, Nagarajan Natarajan, Gagan Somashekar, Lei Zhao, Ranjita Bhagwan, Rodrigo Fonseca, Tatiana Racheva, Yogesh Bansal
  • What: Automatically tuning cluster manager parameters/setting for ever-changing cluster state.
  • When: May 3rd

• FUSEE: A Fully Memory-Disaggregated Key-Value Store [FAST’23]
  • Authors: Jiacheng Shen, Pengfei Zuo, Xuchuan Luo, Tianyi Yang, Yuxin Su, Yangfan Zhou, and Michael R. Lyu
  • What: KV-store with memory-disaggregated storage and metadata
  • When: May 17th

• ROLEX: A Scalable RDMA-oriented Learned Key-Value Store for Disaggregated Memory Systems [FAST’23]
  • Authors: Pengfei Li, Yu Hua, Pengfei Zuo, Zhangyu Chen, and Jiajie Sheng
  • What: RDMA-based disaggregated memory store with learned index
  • When: May 24th

• Hydra: Serialization-Free Network Ordering for Strongly Consistent Distributed Applications [NSDI’23]
  • Authors: Inho Choi, Ellis Michael, Yunfan Li, Dan R. K. Ports, and Jialin Li
  • What: In-network ordering with distributed sequencers
  • When: May 31st

• Stabilizer: Geo-Replication with User-defined Consistency [ICDCS’22]
  • Authors: Pengze Li, Lichen Pan, Xinzhe Yang, Weijia Song, Zhen Xiao, Ken Birman
  • What: High-performance geo-replication library with user-defined consistency and separated control and data planes
  • When: June 7th

• Closing the B+-tree vs. LSM-tree Write Amplification Gap on Modern Storage Hardware with Built-in Transparent Compression [FAST’22]
  • Authors: Yifan Qiao, Xubin Chen, Ning Zheng, Jiangpeng Li, Yang Liu, Tong Zhang
  • What: Reducing B+-tress write amplification
  • When: June 14th
• Real-time Data Infrastructure at Uber
  • Authors: Yupeng Fu, Chinmay Soman
  • What: Uber’s data infrastructure and scalability challenges it faces
  • When: June 21st

Past Meetings

• Papers ##37-50
• Papers ##51-60
• Papers ##61-70
• Papers ##71-80
• Papers ##81-90
• Papers ##91-100
• Papers ##101-110
• Papers ##111-120

Past Special Sessions

1. Building Distributed Systems With Stateright – March 30th @ 1pm EST – Jon Nadal.
2. Distributed Transactions in YugabyteDB – May 11th @12pm EST – Karthik Ranganathan.
3. Fast General Purpose Transactions in Apache Cassandra – February 9thth @ 2 pm EST – Benedict Elliott Smith
4. Scalability and Fault Tolerance in YDB – August 10th @ 2pm EST – Andrey Fomichev