Selected blog posts from 2016

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This is my 42nd post for the year. As is the custom in a year-end post, I mention some highlights among my 41 posts in 2016.

Machine Learning




Facebook papers




Fault-tolerance




Distributed Coordination




TLA+/Pluscal Modeling




Miscellaneous


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Hints for Distributed Systems Design

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Learning about distributed systems: where to start?

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Making database systems usable

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Foundational distributed systems papers

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Advice to the young

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Linearizability: A Correctness Condition for Concurrent Objects

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This paper is from Herlihy and Wing appeared in ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 1990. This is the canonical reference for the linearizability definition. I had not read this paper in detail before, so I thought it would be good to go to the source to see if there are additional delightful surprises in the original text. Hence, this post. I will dive into a technical analysis of the paper first, and then discuss some of my takes toward the end. I had written an accessible explanation of linearizability earlier; you may want to read that first. I will assume an understanding of linearizability to keep this review at reasonable length. Introduction I love how the old papers just barge in with the model, without bothered by pleasantries such as motivation of the problem. These are the first two sentences of the introduction. "A concurrent system consists of a collection of sequential processes that communicate through shared typed objects . This model encompass...
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Understanding the Performance Implications of Storage-Disaggregated Databases

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