Below is the reading group schedule for the upcoming winter term. The schedule is also available in our Google Calendar.

Are you interested in joining the reading group? It is simple, join our Slack (which currently has ~1,500 members!) to get all the reading group updates and invites.

• Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications [HotOS’23]
  • Authors: Sanjay Ghemawat, Robert Grandl, Srdjan Petrovic, Michael Whittaker, Parveen Patel, Ivan Posva, Amin Vahdat
  • What: Monolithic vs (micro-)services? How about logical monoliths?
  • When: November 29th
• Blueprint: A Toolchain for Highly-Reconfigurable Microservice Applications [SOSP’23]
  • Authors: Vaastav Anand, Deepak Garg, Antoine Kaufmann, and Jonathan Mace
  • What: Fast and iterative compile, build, and deploy toolchain for experimentation on micro-service applications.
  • When: December 6th
• Deep Note: Can Acoustic Interference Damage the Availability of Hard Disk Storage in Underwater Data Centers? [HotStorage’23]
  • Authors: Jennifer Sheldon, Weidong Zhu, Adnan Abdullah, Kevin Butler, Md Jahidul Islam, Sara Rampazzi
  • What: An attack on spinning rust in underwater data centers with sound waves (wtf?!).
  • When: December 13th
• FIFO queues are all you need for cache eviction [SOSP’23]
  • Authors: Juncheng Yang∗, Yazhuo Zhang§, Ziyue Qiu∗, Yao Yue†, K. V. Rashmi
  • What: FIFO-based cache eviction algorithm that beats LRU.
  • When: December 20th
• Nezha: Deployable and High-Performance Consensus Using Synchronized Clocks [VLDB]
  • Authors: Jinkun Geng, Anirudh Sivaraman, Balaji Prabhakar, Mendel Rosenblum
  • What: Another consensus protocol that relies on tight synchrony for performance.
  • When: January 10th
• QuePaxa: Escaping the tyranny of timeouts in consensus [SOSP’23]
  • Authors: Pasindu Tennage, Cristina Basescu, Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias, Ewa Syta, Philipp Jovanovic, Vero Estrada-Galiñanes, Bryan Ford
  • What: a hybrid of leader-based and randomized async leaderless consensus.
  • When: January 17th
• Antipode: Enforcing Cross-Service Causal Consistency in Distributed Applications [SOSP’23]
  • Authors: João Ferreira Loff, Daniel Porto, João Garcia, Jonathan Mace, Rodrigo Rodrigues
  • What: Bolt-on library to allow causal consistency across different service boundaries.
  • When: January 25th
• Polaris: Enabling Transaction Priority in Optimistic Concurrency Control [SIGMOD’23]
  • Authors: Chenhao Ye, Wuh-Chwen Hwang, Keren Chen, Xiangyao Yu
  • What: Hybrid of pessimistic and optimistic concurrency control.
  • When: February 1st
• Detock: High Performance Multi-region Transactions at Scale [SIGMOD’23]
  • Authors: Cuong D. T. Nguyen, Johann K. Miller, Daniel J. Abadi
  • What: concurrency control for multi-region TX in geo-replicated systems.
  • When: February 8th
• XFaaS: Hyperscale and Low Cost Serverless Functions at Meta [SOSP’23]
  • Authors: Alireza Sahraei, Soteris Demetriou, Amirali Sobhgol, Haoran Zhang, Abhigna Nagaraja, Neeraj Pathak, Girish Joshi, Carla Souza, Bo Huang, Wya‹ Cook, Andrii Golovei, Pradeep Venkat, Andrew McFague, Dimitrios Skarlatos, Vipul Patel, Ravinder Thind, Ernesto Gonzalez, Yun Jin, and Chunqiang Tang
  • What: Facebook’s internal FaaS
  • When: February 15th