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Showing posts from August, 2020

My Distributed Systems Seminar's reading list for Fall 2020

For the Fall semester distributed systems seminar, we will discuss these papers: Bipartisan Paxos: A Family of Fast, Leaderless, Modular State Machine Replication Protocols eXtreme Modelling in Practice     Starling: A Scalable Query Engine on Cloud Function Services Lambada: Interactive Data Analytics on Cold Data using Serverless Cloud Infrastructure   Tiered Replication: A Cost-effective Alternative to Full Cluster Geo-replication   Scalable State-Machine Replication   Designing Distributed Systems Using Approximate Synchrony in Data Center Networks   Armada: Low-Effort Verification of High-Performance Concurrent Programs   Ocean Vista: Gossip-Based Visibility Control for Speedy Geo-Distributed Transactions   Consolidating Concurrency Control and Consensus for Commits under Conflicts    Tales of the Tail: Hardware, OS, and Application-level Sources of Tail Latency   Near-Optimal Latency Versus Cost Tradeoffs in Geo-Distributed Storage   Scaling Symbolic Evaluation for Automated Veri

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (Steven Levy, 2011)

I read this book recently. Going into this, I knew I wouldn't learn many new/surprising things. After all, I have been following Google from outside since 1999. After I saw Google in action, I had switched to it immediately. I was quick to get on board with Gmail as well, and followed many Google services over the years. I have seen things.   As I anticipated, I didn't find many surprises in the book. But I liked the book nevertheless. It is always nice to read stuff from Steven Levy.  Steven Levy is one of my favorite authors. I have a dog-eared copy of the Hackers book he wrote. It was excellent writing. So much research went into each character in the book, and he made each character come alive. He also weaved the narration together artistically around a handful of themes and related new information/events back to these themes. He had put a lot of his interpretation and insight in to the facts/narrative, and I really enjoyed that.  This book is not as colorful. It has a raw

The Impact of RDMA on Agreement

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This paper appeared in PODC 2019. PODC stands for Principles of Distributed Computing. It is a theoretical distributed systems conference, first established in 1982. I had published my first ever paper, " Resettable Vector Clocks " at PODC 2000. The conference was held in Portland and, as a fresh graduate student attending it, I was awe-struck at the conference. On day one of the conference, I saw Leslie Lamport interrupting a talk asking a question and protesting loudly. Then Keith Marzullo in the audience (I think) pointed out the misunderstanding and Leslie Lamport said "Nevermind" and calmed down. I also noticed that the person sitting next to me was, oh my God, Nancy Lynch! I couldn't believe my luck seeing all these distributed systems royalty in person. Also in this conference, on day three, Eric Brewer gave his CAP theorem talk.   Good times! Anyways, back to the paper.  Contributions of the paper Under the message-passing model, BFT consensus requires

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