Reading Group

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.

• Metastable Failures in the Wild [OSDI’22]
  • Authors: Lexiang Huang, Matthew Magnusson, Abishek Bangalore Muralikrishna, Salman Estyak, Rebecca Isaacs, Abutalib Aghayev, Timothy Zhu, Aleksey Charapko
  • What: An exploration of many significant outages that illustrates a new class of “self-feeding” failures.
  • When: August 31th
• Enabling the Next Generation of Multi-Region Applications with CockroachDB [SIGMOD’22]
  • Authors: Nathan VanBenschoten, Arul Ajmani, Marcus Gartner, Andrei Matei, Aayush Shah, Irfan Sharif, Alexander Shraer, Adam Storm, Rebecca Taft, Oliver Tan, Andy Woods, Peyton Walters
  • What: Global distribution in multi-region SQL database.
  • When: September 7th
• High Throughput Replication with Integrated Membership Management [ATC’22]
  • Authors: Pedro Fouto, Nuno Preguiça, João Leitão
  • What: Paxos over a chain replication
  • When: September 14th
• Debugging the OmniTable Way [OSDI’22]
  • Authors: Andrew Quinn, Jason Flinn, Michael Cafarella, Baris Kasikci
  • What: Debugging applications through the queriable history of application states.
  • When: September 21st
• Understanding and Detecting Software Upgrade Failures in Distributed Systems [SOSP’21]
  • Authors: Yongle Zhang, Junwen Yang, Zhuqi Jin, Utsav Sethi, Kirk Rodrigues, Shan Lu, Ding Yuan
  • What: Study of real-world upgrade failures and lessons learned from these failures.
  • When: September 28th
• Skeena: Efficient and Consistent Cross-Engine Transactions [SIGMOD’22]
  • Authors: Jianqiu Zhang, Kaisong Huang, Tianzheng Wang, King Lv
  • What: Transactions across database engines with various isolation levels.
  • When: October 5th
• Special Session: YDB Transactions
  • When: October 19th
• RRC: Responsive Replicated Containers [ATC’22]
  • Authors: Diyu Zhou, Yuval Tamir
  • What: Container replication using periodic checkpoints and replay.
  • When: October 26th
• TAOBench: An End-to-End Benchmark for Social Network Workloads [VLDB]
  • Authors: Audrey Cheng, Xiao Shi, Aaron Kabcenell, Shilpa Lawande, Hamza Qadeer, Jason Chan, Harrison Tin, Ryan Zhao, Peter Bailis, Mahesh Balakrishnan, Nathan Bronson, Natacha Crooks, Ion Stoica
  • What: See the paper’s title!
  • When: November 2nd 19th
• Cancellation in Systems: An Empirical Study of Task Cancellation Patterns and Failures [OSDI’22]
  • Authors: Utsav Sethi, Haochen Pan, Shan Lu, Madanlal Musuvathi, Suman Nath
  • What: Study of task cancelation features and bugs across various applications and languages to find common issues with task cancelations.
  • When: November 9th
• Amazon DynamoDB: A Scalable, Predictably Performant, and Fully Managed NoSQL Database Service [ATC’22]
  • Authors: Mostafa Elhemali, Niall Gallagher, Nicholas Gordon, Joseph Idziorek, Richard Krog, Colin Lazier, Erben Mo, Akhilesh Mritunjai, Somu Perianayagam, Tim Rath, Swami Sivasubramanian, James Christopher Sorenson III, Sroaj Sosothikul, Doug Terry, Akshat Vig
  • What: History and overview of Amazon’s scalable cloud database.
  • When: November 16th

Past Meetings

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

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