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Reading Group. EPaxos Revisited.
In the 88th DistSys meeting, we discussed the “EPaxos Revisited” NSDI’21 paper by Sarah Tollman, Seo Jin Park, and John Ousterhout. We had an improvised presentation, as I had to step in and talk about the paper on short notice without much preparation. EPaxos Background Today’s paper re-evaluates one very popular in academia state machine…
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New Reading List: Papers #91-100
DistSys Reading Group is getting its 100th paper! Here is the list for the Spring semester: The Drinking Philosophers Problem – Foundational Paper Authors: K. M. Chandy and J. Misra When: February 23rd CompuCache: Remote Computable Caching using Spot VMs — CIDR’22 Authors: Qizhen Zhang, Philip A. Bernstein, Daniel S. Berger, Badrish Chandramouli, Vincent Liu,…
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Reading Group. Log-structured Protocols in Delos
For the 87th DistSys paper, we looked at “Log-structured Protocols in Delos” by Mahesh Balakrishnan, Chen Shen, Ahmed Jafri, Suyog Mapara, David Geraghty, Jason Flinn Vidhya Venkat, Ivailo Nedelchev, Santosh Ghosh, Mihir Dharamshi, Jingming Liu, Filip Gruszczynski, Jun Li Rounak Tibrewal, Ali Zaveri, Rajeev Nagar, Ahmed Yossef, Francois Richard, Yee Jiun Song. The paper appeared…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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