Reading Group

  • Reading Group. Characterizing and Optimizing Remote Persistent Memory with RDMA and NVM

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    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,…

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  • Reading Group. NrOS: Effective Replication and Sharing in an Operating System

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    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…

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  • Reading Group Paper List. Papers ##81-90

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    We are continuing the DistSys reading group into the winter term with 10 exciting papers. This list is largely based on SOSP’21 papers. For our foundational paper, we will look at FLP impossibility. Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process –  Classical/Foundation Paper Authors: Michael J. Fischer, Nancy A. Lynch, Michael S. Paterson November…

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  • Reading Group. Avocado: A Secure In-Memory Distributed Storage System

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    Our 76th reading group meeting covered “Avocado: A Secure In-Memory Distributed Storage System” ATC’21 paper. Unfortunately, the original presenter of the paper could not make it to the discussion, and I had to improvise the presentation on the fly: So, the Avocado paper builds a distributed in-memory key-value database with a traditional complement of operations:…

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  • Reading Group. Prescient Data Partitioning and Migration for Deterministic Database Systems

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    In the 75th reading group session, we discussed the transaction locality and dynamic data partitioning through the eyes of a recent OSDI’21 paper – “Don’t Look Back, Look into the Future: Prescient Data Partitioning and Migration for Deterministic Database Systems.”  This interesting paper solves the transaction locality problem in distributed, sharded deterministic databases. The deterministic…

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  • Reading Group. Viewstamped Replication Revisited

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    Our 74th paper was a foundational one — we looked at Viestamped Replication protocol through the lens of the “Viewstamped Replication Revisited” paper. Joran Dirk Greef presented the protocol along with bits of his engineering experience using the protocol in practice. Viestamped Replication (VR) solves the problem of state machine replication in a crash fault…

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  • Reading Group. Polyjuice: High-Performance Transactions via Learned Concurrency Control

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    Our 73rd reading group meeting continued with discussions on transaction execution systems. This time we looked at the “Polyjuice: High-Performance Transactions via Learned Concurrency Control” OSDI’21 paper by Jiachen Wang, Ding Ding, Huan Wang, Conrad Christensen, Zhaoguo Wang, Haibo Chen, and Jinyang Li.  This paper explores single-server transaction execution. In particular, it looks at concurrency…

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  • Reading Group. Meerkat: Multicore-Scalable Replicated Transactions Following the Zero-Coordination Principle

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    Our 72nd paper was on avoiding coordination as much as possible. We looked at the “Meerkat: Multicore-Scalable Replicated Transactions Following the Zero-Coordination Principle” EuroSys’20 paper by Adriana Szekeres, Michael Whittaker, Jialin Li, Naveen Kr. Sharma, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Dan R. K. Ports, Irene Zhang. As the name suggests, this paper discusses coordination-free distributed transaction execution. In…

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  • Reading Group. DistAI: Data-Driven Automated Invariant Learning for Distributed Protocols

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    In the 71st DistSys reading group meeting, we have discussed “DistAI: Data-Driven Automated Invariant Learning for Distributed Protocols” OSDI’21 paper. Despite the misleading title, this paper has nothing to do with AI or Machine Learning. Instead, it focuses on the automated search for invariants in distributed algorithms. I will be brief and a bit hand-wavy…

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  • Reading Group. In Reference to RPC: It’s Time to Add Distributed Memory

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    Our 70th meeting covered the “In Reference to RPC: It’s Time to Add Distributed Memory” paper by Stephanie Wang, Benjamin Hindman, and Ion Stoica. This paper proposes some improvements to remote procedure call (RPC) frameworks. In current RPC implementations, the frameworks pass parameters to function by value. The same happens to the function return values.…

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