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One Page Summary: “milliScope: a Fine-Grained Monitoring Framework for Performance Debugging of n-Tier Web Services”
Authors of the ICDCS2017 milliScope paper attack an interesting monitoring problem for distributed systems: detecting and determining a cause of short-lived events in the system. In particular, they address the issue of identifying very short bottlenecks (VSBs) in distributed web services. VSBs manifest themselves as performance degradation of a small number of requests, however they…
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Retroscoping Zookeeper Staleness
ZooKeeper is a popular coordination service used as part of many large scale distributed systems. ZooKeeper provides a file-system inspired abstraction to the users on top of its replicated key-value store. Like other Paxos-inspired protocols, ZooKeeper is typically deployed on at least 3 nodes, and can tolerate F node failure for a cluster of size…
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Why Government IT is Expensive and Archaic
Disclaimer: I do not work for the government, and my rant below is based on my very limited exposure to how IT works at the US government setting. Why Government IT is Expensive and Archaic? I think, this can be a very long discussion, but I do have a quick answer: standards imposed by government…
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One Page Summary: “Musketeer: all for one, one for all in data processing systems”.
Many distributed computation platforms and programming frameworks exist today, and new ones constantly popping out from the industry and academia. Some platforms are domain specific, such as TensorFlow for machine learning. Others, like Hadoop and Naiad are more general, and this generality allows for sophisticated and specialized programming abstractions to be built on top. So…
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One Page Summary: “Slicer: Auto-Sharding for Datacenter Applications”
One of the questions engineers of large distributed system must answer is “where to compute”. This is a big and important question, as we do not want to send a request originating in the US to some server in Australia. It simply makes no sense to incur the communication overhead if there are resources available…
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One Page Summary: Incremental, Iterative Processing with Timely Dataflow
This paper describes Naiad distributed computation system. Naiad uses dataflow model to represent the computations, but it aims to be a general dataflow framework in contrast to other specialized approaches such as TensorFlow. Similarly to other dataflow systems, the computations are represented as graphs, where vertices represent data and operations and edges carry the data…
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Is Java Fast Enough for Distributed Applications?
Lots of modern distributed systems are built with Java programming language, and consequently use Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as their execution environment. The list of such systems is rather large: Hadoop, Spark, HBase, Cassandra, Voldemort, ZooKeeper, BookKeeper, Kafka, and the list goes on and on. But is JVM fast enough for these systems? Anyone who…
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