Reading Group

  • Reading Group. Evolution of Development Priorities in Key-value Stores Serving Large-scale Applications: The RocksDB Experience

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    On Wednesday, we had our 26th reading group meeting, discussing RocksDB with a help of a recent experience paper: “Evolution of Development Priorities in Key-value Stores Serving Large-scale Applications: The RocksDB Experience.” Single-server key-value storage systems are crucial for so many distributed systems and databases. For distributed folks like myself, these often remain black-boxes that…

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  • Reading Group. Unifying Timestamp with Transaction Ordering for MVCC with Decentralized Scalar Timestamp

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    Unlike many of my recent summarier, I will mskr this one short, I promise. “Unifying Timestamp with Transaction Ordering for MVCC with Decentralized Scalar Timestamp” NSDI’21 paper proposes a mechanism to order transactions in multi-version distributed data-stores. One of the problems with distributed transactions is the ordering required to achieve consistency. In particular, we often…

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  • Reading Group. Strong and Efficient Consistency with Consistency-Aware Durability

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    In the 62nd reading group session, we covered the “Strong and Efficient Consistency with Consistency-Aware Durability” paper from FAST’20. Jesse did an excellent presentation for the group that explains the core of the paper rather well: This paper describes a problem with many leader-based replication protocols. It specifically focuses on ZooKeper and Zab, but similar…

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  • Reading Group. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types

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    We kicked off a new set of papers in the reading group with some fundamental reading – “Conflict-free Replicated Data Types.” Although not very old (and not the first one to suggest something similar to CRDTs), the paper we discussed presents a proper definition of Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) and the consistency framework around…

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  • Reading Group. Exploiting Symbolic Execution to Accelerate Deterministic Databases

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    We have covered 60 papers in our reading group so far! The 60th paper we explored was “Exploiting Symbolic Execution to Accelerate Deterministic Databases” from ICDCS’20. I enjoyed the paper quite a lot, even though there are some claims I do not necessarily agree with. The paper solves the problem of executing transactions in deterministic…

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  • Reading Group. Multitenancy for Fast and Programmable Networks in the Cloud.

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    We discussed “Multitenancy for Fast and Programmable Networks in the Cloud” in the 59th DistSys Reading Group meeting. In a sense, this was a continuation of a previous discussion we had a few months ago when covering Pegasus paper.  Pegasus and many other new protocols rely on specialized programmable network hardware that is not yet…

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  • Reading Group Paper List. Papers ##61-70

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    We have gone through our current list of papers, covering 10 interesting projects over the past 10 weeks. Now it is time to move on with a new set of papers that will carry the reading group all the way through the summer term. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types – June 16th Strong and Efficient Consistency…

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  • Reading Group. Cerebro: A Layered Data Platform for Scalable Deep Learning

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    In the 58th reading group session, we covered “Cerebro: A Layered Data Platform for Scalable Deep Learning.” This was a short meeting, as our original presenter, unfortunately, had some other important commitments. There are actually two Cerebro papers, one appeared at CIDR and another one at VLDB’20. The main premise behind the system is that…

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  • Reading Group. XFT: Practical Fault Tolerance beyond Crashes

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    In the 57th reading group meeting, we continued looking at byzantine fault tolerance. In particular, we looked at “XFT: Practical Fault Tolerance beyond Crashes” OSDI’16 paper. Today’s summary & discussion will be short, as I am doing it way past my regular time. The paper talks about a fault tolerance model that is stronger than…

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  • Reading Group. chainifyDB: How to get rid of your Blockchain and use your DBMS instead

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    Our recent meeting focused on Blockchains, as we discussed “chainifyDB: How to get rid of your Blockchain and use your DBMS instead” CIDR’21 paper. The presentation by Karolis Petrauskas is available here: The paper argues for using existing and proven technology to implement a permissioned blockchain-like system. The core idea is to leverage relational SQL-99…

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