End of Term! (and how I read a paper…)

March 30, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

It's been a real pleasure interacting with so many of you that read The Morning Paper. Some of you have told me that you read it in the morning, but others save it for lunchtime, or even to wind down after work. Some forward it around their teams to encourage broader awareness, and many of ... Continue Reading

Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions

March 27, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Scalable Atomic Visibility with RAMP Transactions - Bailis et al. 2014 RAMP transactions came up last week as part of the secret sauce in Coordination avoidance in database systems that contributed to a 25x improvement on the TPC-C benchmark. So what exactly are RAMP transactions and why might we need them? As soon as you ... Continue Reading

Lineage-driven Fault Injection

March 26, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

Lineage-driven Fault Injection - Alvaro et al. 2015 (** fixed broken link to SPL paper review **) This is the third of three papers looking at techniques that can help us to build more robust distributed systems. First we saw how the Statecall Policy Language can enforce rules on single node of a distributed system ... Continue Reading

SAMC: Semantic-aware model checking for fast discovery of deep bugs in cloud systems

March 25, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

SAMC: Semantic-aware model checking for fast discovery of deep bugs in cloud systems - Leesatapornwongsa et al. 2014 This is the second of three papers we'll be looking at this week on the theme of verifying correctness of, and catching bugs in, distributed systems. Yesterday we saw the Statecall Policy Language and associated tool chain ... Continue Reading

Combining static model checking with dynamic enforcement using the Statecall Policy Language

March 23, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Combining static model checking with dynamic enforcement using the Statecall Policy Language - Madhavapeddy 2009 We know that getting distributed systems right is hard, and subtle, 'deep' bugs can lurk in both algorithms and implementations. Can we do better than informal reasoning coupled with some unit and integration tests? Evidence suggests we have to do ... Continue Reading

Building on quicksand

March 23, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Building on Quicksand - Helland & Campbell 2009 Last week we looked at Consistency analysis in Bloom, and Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems. A common theme in both of these is that some collaboration between the application (understanding of application level semantics) and datastore is key to unlocking the next level of performance. We can ... Continue Reading

Out of the Tar Pit

March 20, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Out of the Tar Pit - Moseley & Marks 2006 This is the final Desert Island Paper choice from Jonas Bonér, and a great way to round out the week. 'Out of the Tar Pit' was the 10th paper that I covered in the #themorningpaper series, but at that time I was only giving highlights ... Continue Reading

Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems

March 19, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 23 Comments

Coordination Avoidance in Database Systems - Bailis et al. 2014 The very title of this paper speaks to the theme we've been looking at so far this week - how to reduce the amount of coordination needed in a distributed system. (Which seems fitting having just spent the prior two weeks looking at how costly ... Continue Reading

A Comprehensive study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types

March 18, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 16 Comments

A comprehensive study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types - Shapiro et al. 2011 This is the third of five Desert Island Paper choices from Jonas Bonér, and it continues the theme of avoiding coordination overhead in a principled manner whenever you can. As we saw yesterday, there are trade-offs between consistency, failure tolerance, ... Continue Reading

Consistency, Availability, and Convergence + COPS

March 17, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 12 Comments

Consistency, Availability, and Convergence Mahajan et al. 2014, and Don't Settle for Eventual: Scalable Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS - LLoyd et al. 2011 This is the second of five Desert Island Paper selections from Jonas Bonér that we'll be looking at this week. I've turned this post into a double-header since Consistency, ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

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