storage

  • Reading Group #153. Deep Note: Can Acoustic Interference Damage the Availability of Hard Disk Storage in Underwater Data Centers?

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    For the 153rd reading group paper, we read something very different this time: “Deep Note: Can Acoustic Interference Damage the Availability of Hard Disk Storage in Underwater Data Centers?” This HotStorage short paper explores the possibility of using soundwaves to attack underwater data centers. In particular, the paper shows how magnetic disks can be disrupted…

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  • Reading Group. Achieving High Throughput and Elasticity in a Larger-than-Memory Store

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    “Achieving High Throughput and Elasticity in a Larger-than-Memory Store” paper by Chinmay Kulkarni, Badrish Chandramouli, and Ryan Stutsman discusses elastic, scalable distributed storage. The paper proposes Shadowfax, an extension to the FASTER single-node KV-store. The particular use case targeted by Shadowfax is the ingestion of large volumes of (streaming) data. The system does not appear…

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  • Reading Group. When Cloud Storage Meets RDMA

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    I am very behind on the reading group summaries, so this summary will be short and less detailed. In the 67th reading group meeting, we discussed the “When Cloud Storage Meets RDMA” paper from Alibaba. This paper is largely an experience report on using RDMA in practical storage systems.  Large-scale RDMA deployments are rather difficult…

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  • Reading Group. Evolution of Development Priorities in Key-value Stores Serving Large-scale Applications: The RocksDB Experience

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    On Wednesday, we had our 26th reading group meeting, discussing RocksDB with a help of a recent experience paper: “Evolution of Development Priorities in Key-value Stores Serving Large-scale Applications: The RocksDB Experience.” Single-server key-value storage systems are crucial for so many distributed systems and databases. For distributed folks like myself, these often remain black-boxes that…

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  • Reading Group. Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale

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    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. Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna.

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    This week we looked at “Autoscaling Tiered Cloud Storage in Anna.” This is the second Anna paper. The first one introduces Anna Key-Value store, and the second paper talks about various “cloud-native” improvements. The presentation by Michael Whittaker is available here: Short Summary Anna is an eventual-consistent key-value data store, where each value is a…

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  • Reading Group. Aria: A Fast and Practical Deterministic OLTP Database.

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    In our 33rd reading group meeting, we discussed “Aria: A Fast and Practical Deterministic OLTP Database.” by Yi Lu, Xiangyao Yu, Lei Cao, Samuel Madden. We had a very nice presentation by Alex Miller: Quick Summary Aria is a transaction protocol, heavily influenced by Calvin, and it largely adopts Calvin’s transaction model, with one big…

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  • Reading Group. High availability in cheap distributed key value storage

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    Our recent paper was “High availability in cheap distributed key value storage”. And what a paper that was! It was definitely a mind-tingling read the lead to a very interesting and long discussion session with the group. Short Summary The paper addresses the problem of fast recovery from the leader (primary) crashes in key-value stores…

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  • One Page Summary. Gryff: Unifying Consensus and Shared Registers

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    This paper by Matthew Burke, Audrey Cheng, and Wyatt Lloyd appeared in NSDI 2020 and explores an interesting idea of a hybrid replication protocol. The premise is very simple – we can take one protocol that solves a part of the problem well, and marry it with another protocol that excels at the second half…

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