Welcome to the DistSys Reading Group! Every week we present and discuss one distributed systems paper. We try to focus on relatively new papers, although we occasionally break this rule for some important older publications. The main objective of this group is to share knowledge through discussion. Our participants come from academia and industry and often carry a unique perspective and expertise on the subject matter.

Format

We start each meeting with a short presentation of the paper by one of the group members. We record the presentation and later upload it to YouTube for the general audience. After the presentation, we move into a group discussion of the paper. This part is not on the record to make sure we can speak freely about the topic and the paper. However, I write a moderated discussion summary for each meeting and post it here. All the summaries are available via the “Summary” link next to the paper title. To see the archive of past meetings, scroll down to the “Past Meetings” section below.

Meeting Info

• Meeting Time: Thursdays at 1:00 PM EST (10 am PST)
• Duration: ~1 hour
• Slack Channel – Join our Slack for Zoom information
• YouTube Channel
• Google Calendar with our schedule.

Current Schedule (Papers ##191-200)

This is a list of papers for the DistSys reading group Spring 2025 term. The schedule is also available on our Google Calendar.

• Occam’s Razor for Distributed Protocols [SoCC’24]
  • Authors: Ziliang Lai, Fan Cui, Hua Fan, Eric Lo, Wenchao Zhou, Feifei Li
  • What: a plug-and-play optimization strategy for distributed protocols
  • When: 02/13/2025
• OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck [CIDR’25]
  • Authors: Xinjing Zhou, Viktor Leis, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker
  • What: Bottlenecks of modern (2024) OLTP systems.
  • When: 02/20/2025
• Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing [CIDR’25]
  • Authors: Yannis Chronis, Anastasia Ailamaki, Lawrence Benson, Helena Caminal, Jana Gičeva, Dave Patterson, Eric Sedlar, Lisa Wu Wills
  • What: Another call towards memory disaggregation.
  • When: 02/27/2025
• Golgi: Performance-Aware, Resource-Efficient Function Scheduling for Serverless Computing [SoCC’23]
  • Authors: Suyi Li, Wei Wang, Jun Yang, Guangzhen Chen, Daohe Lu
  • What: Serverless function scheduling with a sprinkle of AI for more efficient resource provisioning.
  • When: 03/06/2025
• The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling [SoCC’24]
  • Authors: Noman Bashir, Varun Gohil, Anagha Belavadi Subramanya, Mohammad Shahrad, David Irwin, Elsa Olivetti, Christina Delimitrou
  • What: Metrics for quantifying the impact of computing on environment/climate
  • When: 03/27/2025
• Efficient Reproduction of Fault-Induced Failures in Distributed Systems with Feedback-Driven Fault Injection [SOSP’24]
  • Authors: Jia Pan, Haoze Wu, Tanakorn Leesatapornwongsa, Suman Nath, Peng Huang
  • What: fault injection to reproduce production system failures with external root causes, such as HW failures or dependency failures.
  • When: 04/03/2025
• FBDetect: Catching Tiny Performance Regressions at Hyperscale through In-Production Monitoring [SOSP’24]
  • Authors: Dong Young Yoon, Yang Wang, Miao Yu, Elvis Huang, Juan Ignacio Jones, Abhinay Kukkadapu, Osman Kocas, Jonathan Wiepert, Kapil Goenka, Sherry Chen, Yanjun Lin, Zhihui Huang, Jocelyn Kong, Michael Chow, Chunqiang Tang
  • What: Another performance regression paper from Meta, but this time using monitoring of live production systems instead of catching regressions with a testing suite.
  • When: 04/10/2025
• LazyLog: A New Shared Log Abstraction for Low-Latency Applications [SOSP’24]
  • Authors: Xuhao Luo, Shreesha G. Bhat, Jiyu Hu, Ramnatthan Alagappan, Aishwarya Ganesan
  • What: Shared log with delayed ordering, such that order is established after acking the log appends but before materializing them for readers
  • When: 04/17/2025
• Caerus: Low-Latency Distributed Transactions for Geo-Replicated Systems [VLDB’24]
  • Authors: Joshua Hildred, Michael Abebe, Khuzaima Daudjee
  • What: Low latency ordering protocol for deterministic transactional databases over WAN
  • When: 04/24/2025
• Zero-sided RDMA: Network-driven Data Shuffling for Disaggregated Heterogeneous Cloud DBMSs [SIGMOD’24]
  • Authors: Matthias Jasny, Lasse Thostrup, Sajjad Tamimi, Andreas Koch, Zsolt István, Carsten Binnig
  • What: RDMA with programmable switches in the network
  • When: 05/01/2025

Past Meetings

• Papers ##37-50
• Papers ##51-60
• Papers ##61-70
• Papers ##71-80
• Papers ##81-90
• Papers ##91-100
• Papers ##101-110
• Papers ##111-120
• Papers ##121-130
• Papers ##131-140
• Papers ##141-150
• Papers ##151-160
• Papers ##161-170
• Papers ##171-180

Past Special Sessions

1. Building Distributed Systems With Stateright – March 30th @ 1pm EST – Jon Nadal.
2. Distributed Transactions in YugabyteDB – May 11th @12pm EST – Karthik Ranganathan.
3. Fast General Purpose Transactions in Apache Cassandra – February 9thth @ 2 pm EST – Benedict Elliott Smith
4. Scalability and Fault Tolerance in YDB – August 10th @ 2pm EST – Andrey Fomichev