Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment

February 16, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment - Halpern & Moses '90 (initial version 1984). This is the first of five 'Desert island papers' chosen by Peter Alvaro, and what a great choice to kick the week off with. It's a long read, coming in at 36 pages (45 if you include the proofs ... Continue Reading

Desert Island Papers: Peter Alvaro

February 16, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

There's a famous UK radio programme that's been running since 1942 called 'Desert Island Discs.' This is a programme in which "a well-known person is asked the question, if you were to be cast away alone on a desert island, which eight gramophone records would you choose to have with you, assuming of course, that ... Continue Reading

The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems

February 13, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems - Burrows '06 This paper describes the Chubby lock service at Google, which was designed as a coarse-grained locking service, found use mostly as a name service and configuration repository, and inspired the creation of Zookeeper. [Chubby's] design is based on well-known ideas that have meshed ... Continue Reading

Enterprise Database Applications and the Cloud: A difficult road ahead

February 12, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Enterprise Database Applications and the Cloud: A difficult road ahead - Stonebraker et al. 2014 In the rush to the cloud, stateless application components are well catered for but state always makes things more complicated. In this paper, Stonebraker et al. set out some of the reasons enterprise database applications present challenges to cloud migration. ... Continue Reading

Encapsulation of parallelism in the Volcano query processing system

February 11, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Encapsulation of parallelism in the volcano query processing system - Graefe '89. You may have picked up on the throwaway line in the Impala paper: "The execution model is the traditional Volcano-style with Exchange operators." So what exactly is the 'traditional Volcano style', and what are 'exchange operators'? Today's choice is the paper that first ... Continue Reading

Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box

February 10, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Personal Data: Thinking inside the box - Haddadi et al. 2015. This paper got some coverage in the press recently with a story in the British newspaper "The Guardian" headlined "Fightback against internet giants' stranglehold on personal data starts here." Amongst the authors we also find Jon Crowcroft (who wrote yesterday's paper 'On the duality ... Continue Reading

On the duality of resilience and privacy

February 9, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

On the duality of resilience and privacy - Crowcroft '15 Somewhat of a philosophical start to the week this week as Jon Crowcroft makes the argument for greater privacy through some of the same mechanisms that give systems greater resilience. Plus, it includes this quote: It is a truth universally acknowledged that centralized cloud services ... Continue Reading

Specialized Evolution of the General Purpose CPU

February 6, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Specialized Evolution of the General Purpose CPU - Rajwar et. al. 2015 This is the last in a series of five posts highlighting papers from the recent CIDR'15 conference. Today's choice was the keynote talk. If you like this kind of subject matter, see also the excellent 'What's new in CPUs since the 80s and ... Continue Reading

Impala: a modern, open-source SQL engine for Hadoop

February 5, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Impala: A modern, open-source SQL engine for Hadoop - Kornacker et al . 2015 (Cloudera*) This is post 4 of 5 in a series looking at the latest research from CIDR'15. Also in the series so far this week: 'The missing piece in complex analytics', 'WANalytics, analytics for a geo-distributed, data intensive world', and 'Liquid: ... Continue Reading

Liquid: Unifying nearline and offline big data integration

February 4, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Liquid: Unifying Nearline and Offline Big Data Integration - Fernandez et al. 2015 This is post 3 of 5 in a series looking at the latest research from the CIDR '15 conference. Also in the series so far this week: 'The missing piece in complex analytics' and 'WANalytics: analytics for a geo-distributed, data intensive world'. ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
Made delightfully fast by strattic

Month: February 2015