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Showing posts from July, 2025

ATC/OSDI’25 Technical Sessions

ATC and OSDI ran in parallel. As is tradition, OSDI was single-track ; ATC had two parallel tracks . The schedules and papers are online as linked above. USENIX is awesome: it has been open access for its conference proceedings since 2008. So you can access all the paper pdfs through the links above now. I believe the presentation videos will be made available soon as well. Kudos to USENIX! I attended the OSDI opening remarks delivered by the PC chairs, Lidong Zhou (Microsoft) and Yuan Yuan Zhou (UCSD). OSDI saw 339 submissions this year, which is up 20% from last year. Of those, 53 were accepted, for an acceptance rate of 16%. The TPC worked through Christmas to keep the publication machine running. We really are a bunch of workaholics. Who needs family time when you have rebuttals to respond to? OSDI gave two best paper awards: Basilisk: Using Provenance Invariants to Automate Proofs of Undecidable Protocols. Tony Nuda Zhang and Keshav Singh, University of Michigan; Tej Chajed, Unive...

ATC/OSDI 2025 impressions

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This week I was in Boston for ATC/OSDI’25. Downtown Boston is a unique place where two/three-hundred-year-old homes and cobblestone streets are mixed with sleek buildings and biotech towers. The people here look wicked smart and ambitious (although lacking the optimism/cheer of Bay area people). It’s a sharp contrast from Buffalo, where the ambition is more about not standing out. Boston was burning. 90°F and humid. I made the mistake of booking late, so I got the DoubleTree Boston-Downtown instead of the conference hotel. The mile-long walk to the Sheraton felt like a hike through a sauna. By the time I got there, my undershirt was soaked, and stuck to my back cold under the conference hall’s AC.  Jane Street's fitted t-shirt swag saved the day. The Sheraton looked ragged from the outside, aged on the inside, but it was functional. The conference felt underfilled, with many empty seats. Later, I learned that the total ATC+OSDI attendance was under 500. That's a big drop from e...

Chapter 7: Distributed Recovery (Concurrency Control Book)

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Chapter 7 of the Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems book by Bernstein and Hadzilacos (1987) tackles the distributed commit problem: ensuring atomic commit across a set of distributed sites that may fail independently. The chapter covers these concepts: The challenges of transaction processing in distributed database systems (which wasn't around in 1987) Failure models (site and communication) and timeout-based detection The definition and guarantees of Atomic Commitment Protocols (ACPs) The Two-Phase Commit (2PC) protocol (and its cooperative termination variant) The limitations of 2PC (especially blocking) Introduction and advantages of the Three-Phase Commit (3PC) protocol Despite its rigor and methodical development, the chapter feels like a suspense movie today. We, the readers, equipped with modern tools like FLP impossibility result and Paxos protocol watch as the authors try to navigate a minefield, unaware of the lurking impossibility results that were pu...

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