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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…
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Reading Group. Scaling Large Production Clusters with Partitioned Synchronization
Our 79th paper was “Scaling Large Production Clusters with Partitioned Synchronization.” ATC’21 paper by Yihui Feng, Zhi Liu, Yunjian Zhao, Tatiana Jin, Yidi Wu, Yang Zhang, James Cheng, Chao Li, Tao Guan. This time around, I will not summarize the paper much since A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, who presented the paper, has written a very…
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Reading Group. Characterizing and Optimizing Remote Persistent Memory with RDMA and NVM
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
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
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
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
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…
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