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This paper appeared in OSDI'14. The authors are Chao Xie, Chunzhi Su, Manos Kapritsos, Yang Wang, Navid Yaghmazadeh, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Prince Mahajan, all from The University of Texas at Austin. Here you can watch a video of the OSDI presentation of the paper, and also find the presentation slides and the paper available as open access.  USENIX knows how to do conferences right. Dropping ACID ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) approach provides ease-of-programming through its simple transaction abstraction, but loses on the performance. BASE (Basically-Available, Soft state, Eventually consistent) approach , popularized by the NoSQL systems, provides good performance (low-latency, high-throughput, and scalability), but loses on the ease-of-programming due to increased complexity of concurrent execution in distributed systems. This paper introduces Salt, which aims to find a best-of-both-worlds middle ground: to provide high performance like BASE with mode...

Notes  from the "Good prose" This book is written by a journalist turned nonfiction author and his editor. This is a nice book, and a good read. "Quiet beginnings: You cannot make the reader love/trust you in the first sentence, but you can lose the reader with a grand proposition in the first sentence." "To write is to talk to strangers. Prepare the reader, tell everything reader needs to know to read on, but no more." "For a story to live, it is essential only that there be something important at stake, a problem that confronts the characters or reader. The unfolding of the problem and its resolutions are the real payoff." "Revelation transforms events into a story." "Don't mess with chronology unless you have a good reason." "On the topic of essays:  Essayists tend to argue with themselves. Who am I to write this? Who cares to read this? If I knew my own mind, I would not make essays, I would make de...

This is a 2012 short paper by Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch that appeared in a special issue commemorating the 12th anniversary of the CAP theorem. Gilbert and Lynch get to write in this special issue because they were the ones to first publish a proof the CAP conjecture put forward by Eric Brewer in PODC 2000 keynote. In this paper, Gilbert and Lynch aim to situate the CAP theorem in the broader context of a family of results in distributed computing theory that shows impossibility of guaranteeing both safety  and liveness  in an unreliable  distributed system. The impossibility results surveyed in relation to CAP concern slightly different problems and slightly different fault models. While it is easy to confuse CAP with those results on a superficial look, on a closer inspection we see that the results are all distinct and none subsume CAP. The CAP problem  The CAP theorem does NOT consider the consensus problem, but considers an easier problem: the atomic ...

Presentation is a very important skill. Determining how to present and communicate your results in an effective manner is  as important as doing the research and getting those results. From the same material you can get a killer job talk or a bummed dissertation talk. Presentation skills can make the difference. Presentation is not a soft skill despite the common misconception among many technical people. It takes a lot of brains, analyzing, and synthesizing to produce a good presentation. You have to understand and internalize your content very well in order to present it clearly in the most engaging and compelling way. So if you fail to present your work clearly, that reflects poorly on you and your work. The audience will think "the work doesn't look significant or promising", or even worse "the presenter doesn't truly understand/internalize his work". The most essential requirement for a successful presentation is practice. I observe that our graduat...