Epigrams on programming

January 16, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Epigrams on programming - Perlis, 1982 See also the original formatted version in PDF at the ACM Digital Library if you have a subscription. A bit of Friday fun today. Not strictly a paper, but certainly a classic! Twitter didn't exist in 1982, though if it did, Alan Perlis would be a master tweeter. This ... Continue Reading

The Tail at Scale

January 15, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments

The Tail at Scale - Dean and Barroso 2013 We've all become familiar with the importance of fault-tolerance and the techniques that can be used to achieve it. Less well-known is the idea of tail-tolerance. A system that doesn't respond quickly enough feels clunky to its users and can have serious negative consequences for site/service ... Continue Reading

Mergeable persistent data structures

January 14, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Mergeable persistent data structures - Farinier et al. 2014 Irmin is part of the MirageOS project that was the subject of yesterday's paper, where it is also the basis for a Git-like persistent file system used for the OS. What if you could version-control a (mutable) persistent data structure, inspect its history, clone a remote ... Continue Reading

Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud

January 13, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 10 Comments

Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud - Madhavapeddy et al. 2013 See also: Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System from ACM Queue. As we discussed in a previous edition of The Morning Paper, there is an increasing mismatch between the traditional OS design point, and the way that we are using the ... Continue Reading

How to write a 21st Century Proof

January 12, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

How to write a 21st Century Proof - Lamport 2012 In this paper Leslie Lamport shares what he has learned in well over 20 years of writing proofs. I am a computer scientist who was educated as a mathematician. I discovered structured proofs through my work on concurrent (multiprocess) algorithms. These algorithms can be quite ... Continue Reading

A Brief History of the Internet

January 9, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

A Brief History of the Internet - Leiner et al. 2003. The above link is to an HTML version. There's a pdf available on the ACM Digital Library too if you have access. This paper was written to give "a factual rendering of the events and activities associated with the development of the early Internet," ... Continue Reading

Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database

January 8, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

Spanner: Google's Globally Distributed Database - Google 2012 Since we've spent the last two days looking at F1 and its online asynchronous schema change support, it seems appropriate today to look at Spanner, the system that underpins them both. There are three interesting stories that come out of the paper for me, each of which ... Continue Reading

Reflections on 100 editions of #themorningpaper

January 7, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

I almost missed the milestone, and then I realised that today was the 100th paper in the #themorningpaper series! I'm sure most readers of my blog posts have figured out the formula by now: I review one CS paper every weekday morning and post the write-up on this blog. Each morning paper is announced via ... Continue Reading

Online, Aysnchronous Schema Change in F1

January 7, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Online, Asynchronous Schema Change in F1 Rae et al. 2013 Continuous deployment and evolution of running services with zero downtime is the holy grail. With stateless services this is comparatively easy to achieve. But once we have stateless services, and especially large volumes of data in a store, things get more difficult. We would ideally ... Continue Reading

F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales

January 6, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 10 Comments

F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales - Google 2012 (** updated paper link above, thanks to Brenden Kromhout for pointing out the dead link **) In recent years, conventional wisdom in the engineering community has been that if you need a highly scalable, high- throughput data store, the only viable option is to use ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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Month: January 2015