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 ##111-120)

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

• C5: Cloned Concurrency Control that Always Keeps Up [VLDB’23]
  • Authors: Jeffrey Helt, Abhinav Sharma, Daniel J. Abadi, Wyatt Lloyd, Jose M. Faleiro
  • What: Enabling a more concurrent execution of copied/replicated operations at the followers.
  • When: December 14th
• The Case for Distributed Shared-Memory Databases with RDMA-Enabled Memory Disaggregation [VLDB’23]
  • Authors: Ruihong Wang, Jianguo Wang, Stratos Idreos, M. Tamer Özsu, Walid G. Aref
  • What: Disaggregated memory keeps compute and memory on separate devices, with compute nodes accessing memory over RDMA. That paper argues for a design of Shared-Memory Databases built over such disaggregated architecture.
  • When: December 21st
• Not that Simple: Email Delivery in the 21st Century [ATC’22]
  • Authors: Florian Holzbauer, Johanna Ullrich, Martina Lindorfer, Tobias Fiebig
  • What: Standards and protocols around email delivery and security. “Only 44.3% [of email providers] can also deliver emails via IPv6,” “encryption is mostly opportunistic, with 89.7% of providers accepting invalid certificates.”
  • When: January 11th
• Cornus: Atomic Commit for a Cloud DBMS with Storage Disaggregation [VLDB’23]
  • Authors: Zhihan Guo, Xinyu Zeng, Kan Wu, Wuh-Chwen Hwang, Ziwei Ren, Xiangyao Yu, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Philip A. Bernstein
  • What: Optimized 2PC for better (tail) latency and less blocking with the help of compare-and-swap in the underlying disaggregated storage system.
  • When: January 18th
• How to fight production incidents?: an empirical study on a large-scale cloud service [SoCC’22]
  • Authors: Supriyo Ghosh, Manish Shetty, Chetan Bansal, Suman Nath
  • What: a study of hundreds of production incidents, identifying gaps (in automation), and suggesting better automation to aid in resolving/preventing such incidents in the future.
  • When: January 25th
• Method overloading the circuit [SoCC’22]
  • Authors: Christopher Meiklejohn, Lydia Stark, Cesare Celozzi, Matt Ranney, Heather Miller
  • What: Taxonomy and evaluation of various circuit-breaker (early termination of RPCs that overload the microservice) design and their impact on service reliability.
  • When: February 1st
• DeepScaling: microservices autoscaling for stable CPU utilization in large scale cloud systems [SoCC’22]
  • Authors: Ziliang Wang, Shiyi Zhu, Jianguo Li, Wei Jiang, K. K. Ramakrishnan, Yangfei Zheng, Meng Yan, Xiaohong Zhang, Alex X. Liu
  • What: Optimization of resource (CPU) usage while preserving stringent service level objectives (SLOs).
  • When: February 8th
• LEGOStore: A Linearizable Geo-Distributed Store Combining Replication and Erasure Coding [VLDB’22]
  • Authors: Hamidreza Zare, Viveck Ramesh Cadambe, Bhuvan Urgaonkar, Nader Alfares, Praneet Soni, Chetan Sharma
  • What: Replication + Erasure coding in WAN data store with low latency and cost
  • When: February 15th
• Design and evaluation of IPFS: a storage layer for the decentralized web [SIGCOMM’22]
  • Authors: Dennis Trautwein, Aravindh Raman, Gareth Tyson, Ignacio Castro, Will Scott, Moritz Schubotz, Bela Gipp, Yiannis Psaras
  • What: InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)
  • When: February 22nd
• Owl: Scale and Flexibility in Distribution of Hot Content
  • Authors: Jason Flinn, Xianzheng Dou, Arushi Aggarwal, Alex Boyko, Francois Richard, Eric Sun, Wendy Tobagus, Nick Wolchko, Fang Zhou
  • What: Peer-to-peer distribution of large and hot objects at Meta with a centralized controller.
  • When: March 1st

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