Aleksey Charapko

  • Reading Group. Cores that don’t count

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    Our 66th paper was a recent HotOS piece about faulty CPUs: “Cores that don’t count.” This paper from Google describes a decently common (at Google datacenter scale) issue with CPUs that may miscompute or silently fail under some conditions. This is a big deal, as we expect CPUs to be deterministic and always provide correct…

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  • Reading Group. FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store

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    Last week we discussed the “FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store” SIGMOD’21 paper. We had a rather detailed presentation by Moustafa Maher. FoundationDB is a transactional distributed key-value store meant to serve as the “foundation” or lower layer for more comprehensive solutions. FoundationDB supports point and ranged access to keys. This is a…

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  • 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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  • Scalable but Wasteful or Why Fast Replication Protocols are Actually Slow

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    In the last decade or so, quite a few new state machine replication protocols emerged in the literature and the internet. I am “guilty” of this myself, with the PigPaxos appearing in this year’s SIGMOD and the PQR paper at HotStorage’19. There are better-known examples as well — EPaxos inspired a lot of development in…

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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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