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Showing posts from August, 2014

Sudoku and research

I got addicted to Sudoku... again. When I have a chance to rest, I enjoy the challenge of solving Sudoku puzzles (*cough* at the expert level) on my iPhone. I think this practice gives my mind sharpness and clarity (my wife would roll her eyes so hard if she heard me say this :-). I was recently thinking of how the process of solving a Sudoku puzzle resembles doing research. 1) Sequencing is important. In Sudoku, you take things step by step. You fill out the obvious cells first. Having filled these, you now have more constraints/clues upon which you can fill in other blocks. You have to solve Sudoku step by step from most obvious to what is made obvious having finished that step. This is also the case in research. You can't rush things; you should start with the simple steps. First you have to attack/complete what you can do currently, so that more things can become available for you to see. You have to climb the stair step by step to see more and do more. 2) Writing is i

Using TLA+ for teaching distributed systems

I am teaching CSE 4/586 Distributed Systems class  again this Fall (Fall 2014). This is the course I have most fun teaching. (I would like to think my students also feel that way :-) I teach the course with emphasis on reasoning about the correctness of distributed algorithms. Here are the topics I cover in sequence: Introduction, Syntax and semantics for distributed programs, predicate calculus Safety and progress properties Proof of program properties Time: logical clocks, State: distributed snapshots Mutual exclusion, Dining philosophers Consensus, Paxos Fault-tolerance, replication, rollback recovery, self-stabilization Programming support for distributed systems Data center computing and cloud computing  CAP theorem and NOSQL systems Distributed/WAN storage systems I put emphasis on reasoning about distributed algorithms because concurrency is very tricky; it truly humbles human brain. More than 3 actions in a distributed program and your intuitions will fail, you

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