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Reading Group. chainifyDB: How to get rid of your Blockchain and use your DBMS instead
Our recent meeting focused on Blockchains, as we discussed “chainifyDB: How to get rid of your Blockchain and use your DBMS instead” CIDR’21 paper. The presentation by Karolis Petrauskas is available here: The paper argues for using existing and proven technology to implement a permissioned blockchain-like system. The core idea is to leverage relational SQL-99…
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Reading Group. Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage
Our last reading group meeting was about storage faults in state machine replications. We looked at the “Protocol-Aware Recovery for Consensus-Based Storage” paper from FAST’18. The paper explores an interesting omission in most of the state machine replication (SMR) protocols. These protocols, such as (multi)-Paxos and Raft, are specified with the assumption of having a…
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Reading Group Special Session: Distributed Transactions in YugabyteDB
When: May 11th at 12:00 pm EST Who: Karthik Ranganathan. Karthik Ranganathan is a founder and CTO of YugabyteDB, a globally distributed, strongly consistent database. Prior to Yugabyte, Karthik was at Facebook, where he built the Cassandra database. In this talk, Karthik will discuss Yugabyte’s use of time synchronization and Raft protocol along with some…
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Reading Group. Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?
In our 54th reading group meeting, we were looking for an answer to an important question in the distributed systems community: “What about Raft?” We looked at the “Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?” paper to try to find the answer. As always, we had an excellent presentation, this time by…
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Reading Group. New Directions in Cloud Programming
Recently we have discussed a CIDR’21 paper: “New Directions in Cloud Programming.” Murat Demirbas did the presentation: Quite honestly, I don’t like to write summaries for this kind of paper. Here, the authors propose a vision for the future of cloud applications, and I feel that summarizing a vision often results in the misinterpretation of…
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Reading Group. Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale
This time around our reading group discussed a distributed filesystem paper. We looked at FAST’21 paper from Facebook: “Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale.” We had a nice presentation by Akash Mishra: The paper talks about a unified filesystem across many services and use cases at Facebook. Historically, Facebook had multiple specialized storage infrastructures: one…
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Reading Group. Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems
On Wednesday we kicked off a new set of papers in the reading group. We have started with one of the classical foundational papers in distributed systems and looked at the Chandy-Lamport token-based distributed snapshot algorithm. The basic idea here is to capture the state of distributed processes and channels by “flushing” the messages out…
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Reading Group. Aragog: Scalable Runtime Verification of Shardable Networked Systems
We have covered 50 papers in the reading group so far! This week we looked at the “Aragog: Scalable Runtime Verification of Shardable Networked Systems” from OSDI’20. This paper discusses the problem of verifying the network functions (NFs), such as NAT Gateways or firewalls at the runtime. The problem is quite challenging due to its…
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Reading Group. Protean: VM Allocation Service at Scale
The last paper in our reading group was “Protean: VM Allocation Service at Scale.” This paper from Microsoft is full of technical insights into how they operate their datacenters/regions at scale. In particular, the paper discusses one of the fundamental components of any cloud provider — the VM service. The system, called Protean, is an…
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Reading Group. Sundial: Fault-tolerant Clock Synchronization for Datacenters
In our 48th reading group meeting, we talked about time synchronization in distributed systems. More specifically, we discussed the poor state of time sync, the reasons for it, and most importantly, the solutions, as outline in the “Sundial: Fault-tolerant Clock Synchronization for Datacenters” OSDI’20 paper. We had a comprehensive presentation by Murat Demirbas. Murat’s talk…
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