Aleksey Charapko
-
Reading Group. Rabia: Simplifying State-Machine Replication Through Randomization
We covered yet another state machine replication (SMR) paper in our reading group: “Rabia: Simplifying State-Machine Replication Through Randomization” by Haochen Pan, Jesse Tuglu, Neo Zhou, Tianshu Wang, Yicheng Shen, Xiong Zheng, Joseph Tassarotti, Lewis Tseng, Roberto Palmieri. This paper appeared at SOSP’21. A traditional SMR approach, based on Raft or Multi-Paxos protocols, involves a…
-
Reading Group. Exploiting Nil-Externality for Fast Replicated Storage
85th DistSys reading group meeting discussed “Exploiting Nil-Externality for Fast Replicated Storage” SOSP’21 paper by Aishwarya Ganesan, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau. The paper uses an old trick of delaying the execution of some operations to improve the throughput while maintaining strong consistency. Consistency is an externally-observable property, and simple strategies,…
-
Reading Group. Faster and Cheaper Serverless Computing on Harvested Resources
The 83rd paper in the reading group continues with another SOSP’21 paper: “Faster and Cheaper Serverless Computing on Harvested Resources” by Yanqi Zhang, Íñigo Goiri, Gohar Irfan Chaudhry, Rodrigo Fonseca, Sameh Elnikety, Christina Delimitrou, Ricardo Bianchini. This paper is the second one in a series of harvested resources papers, with the first one appearing in…
-
Reading Group Special Session: Fast General Purpose Transactions in Apache Cassandra
Modern distributed databases employ leader-based consensus protocols to achieve consistency, entailing certain trade-offs: typically either a scalability bottleneck or weak isolation. Leaderless protocols have been proposed to address these and other shortcomings of leader-based techniques, but these have not yet materialized into production systems. This paper outlines compromises entailed by existing leaderless protocols versus leader-based…
-
Reading Group. Running BGP in Data Centers at Scale
Our 82nd reading group paper was “Running BGP in Data Centers at Scale.” This paper describes how Facebook adopted the BGP protocol, normally used at the Internet-scale, to provide routing capabilities at their datacenters. They are not the first to run BGP in the data center, but the paper is interesting nevertheless at giving some…
-
Reading Group. Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process
Our reading group is on a short winter break, and I finally have some time to catch up with reading group writing and videos. Our 81st paper was a foundational paper in the field of consensus — we looked at the famous FLP impossibility result. The “Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process” paper…
-
Reading Group. UniStore: A fault-tolerant marriage of causal and strong consistency
For the 80th paper in the reading group, we picked “UniStore: A fault-tolerant marriage of causal and strong consistency” by Manuel Bravo, Alexey Gotsman, Borja de Régil, and Hengfeng Wei. This ATC’21 paper adapts the Partial Order-Restrictions consistency (PoR) into a transactional model. UniStore uses PoR to reduce coordination efforts and execute as many transactions…
-
Reading Group. Scaling Large Production Clusters with Partitioned Synchronization
Our 79th paper was “Scaling Large Production Clusters with Partitioned Synchronization.” ATC’21 paper by Yihui Feng, Zhi Liu, Yunjian Zhao, Tatiana Jin, Yidi Wu, Yang Zhang, James Cheng, Chao Li, Tao Guan. This time around, I will not summarize the paper much since A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, who presented the paper, has written a very…
-
Reading Group. Characterizing and Optimizing Remote Persistent Memory with RDMA and NVM
We have looked at the “Characterizing and Optimizing Remote Persistent Memory with RDMA and NVM” ATC’21 paper. This paper investigates a combination of two promising technologies: Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) and Non-Volatile Memory (NVM). We have discussed both of these in our reading group before. RDMA allows efficient access to the remote server’s memory,…
-
Reading Group. NrOS: Effective Replication and Sharing in an Operating System
The 77thth paper discussion in our reading group was “NrOS: Effective Replication and Sharing in an Operating System” from OSDI’21. While not a distributed systems paper, it borrows high-level distributed systems ideas (namely, state machine replication) to create a new NUMA-optimized sequential kernel. See, all modern machines have many CPU cores. OS kernels must be…
Search
Recent Posts
- HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication
- Fall 2025 Reading List (##201-210)
- Paper #196. The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling
- Paper #193. Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing
- Paper #192. OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck
Categories
- One Page Summary (10)
- Other Thoughts (11)
- Paper Review and Summary (15)
- Pile of Eternal Rejections (2)
- Playing Around (14)
- Reading Group (104)
- RG Special Session (4)
- Teaching (2)