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Ocean Vista: Gossip-Based Visibility Control for Speedy Geo-Distributed Transactions
Ocean Vista On Wednesday we had a presentation and discussion of the Ocean Vista (OV) replication and distributed transaction protocol. OV works in the WANs, where each region has all data-partitions, and transactions can originate in any region. OV separates replication from transaction execution, by making replication conflict-free with a FastPaxos-inspired protocol. For the transaction…
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One Page Summary. Gryff: Unifying Consensus and Shared Registers
This paper by Matthew Burke, Audrey Cheng, and Wyatt Lloyd appeared in NSDI 2020 and explores an interesting idea of a hybrid replication protocol. The premise is very simple – we can take one protocol that solves a part of the problem well, and marry it with another protocol that excels at the second half…
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PigPaxos: continue devouring communication bottlenecks in distributed consensus.
This is a short follow-up to Murat’s PigPaxos post. I strongly recommend reading it first as it provides full context for what is to follow. And yes, it also includes the explanation of what pigs have to do with Paxos. Short Recap of PigPaxos. In our recent SIGMOD paper we looked at the bottleneck of…
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One Page Summary. Aegean: Replication beyond the client-server model
One Page Summary. Aegean: Replication beyond the client-server model This paper builds o n a key observation about the operation of complex distributed applications. Namely, microservice style of application rarely follows a simple client-server architecture, where a client makes a request and the server (or servers) respond to a request. Instead, many applications often use…
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One Page Summary: Ring Paxos
This paper (Ring Paxos: A high-throughput atomic broadcast protocol) has been out for quite some time, but it addresses a problem still relevant in many distributed consensus protocols. Ring Paxos aims to reduce the communication load in the Paxos cluster and provide better scalability. As we have shown in our SIGMOD 2019 paper, communication is…
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Paper Summary: Bolt-On Global Consistency for the Cloud
This paper appeared in SOCC 2018, but caught my Paxos attention only recently. The premise of the paper is to provide strong consistency in a heterogeneous storage system spanning multiple cloud providers and storage platforms. Going across cloud providers is challenging, since storage services at different clouds cannot directly talk to each other and replicate the…
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Looking at State and Operational Consistency
Recently I rediscovered the “The many faces of consistency” paper by Marcos Aguilera and Doug Terry. When I first read the paper two years ago, I largely dismissed it as trivial, and, oh boy, now I realized how wrong I was at that time. It is easy to read for sure, and may appear as…
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Python, Numpy and a Programmer Error: Story of a Bizarre Bug
While recently working on my performance analysis for Paxos-style protocols, I uncovered some weird quirks about python and numpy. Ultimately, the problem was with my code, however the symptoms of the issue looked extremely bizarre at first. Modeling WPaxos required doing a series of computations with numpy. In each step, I used numpy to do…
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One Page Summary: “PaxosStore: High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat”
PaxosStore paper, published in VLDB 2017, describes the large scale, multi-datacenter storage system used in WeChat. As the name may suggest, it uses Paxos to provide storage consistency. The system claims to provide storage for many components of the WeChat application, with 1.5TB of traffic per day and tens of thousands of queries per second…
I am an assistant professor of computer science at the University of New Hampshire. My research interests lie in distributed systems, distributed consensus, fault tolerance, reliability, and scalability.
@AlekseyCharapko
aleksey.charapko@unh.edu