Scaling Concurrent Log-Structured Data Stores

April 30, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Scaling Concurrent Log-Structured Data Stores - Golan-Gueta et al. 2015 Key-value stores based on log-structured merge trees are everywhere. The original design was intended to mitigate slow disk I/O. Once this is achieved, as we scale to more and more cores the authors find that in-memory contention now becomes the bottleneck (see yesterday's piece on ... Continue Reading

Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations

April 29, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 27 Comments

How to Quantify Scalability: The Universal Scalability Law (USL) - Gunther Update: corrected sign in USL equation - many thanks to Rob Fielding for pointing out the error. TL;DR: The Universal Scalability Law, Little's Law, and Kingman's Formula can tell you a lot about the behaviour of your systems, and also your organisation. From these ... Continue Reading

Musketeer – Part II: all for one, and one for all in data processing systems

April 28, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Musketeer: all for one, one for all in data processing systems - Gog et al. 2015 Musketeer gives you portability of data processing workflows across across data processing systems. It can even analyse your workflow and recommend the best system to run it on, as well as combining systems for different parts of the workflow. ... Continue Reading

Musketeer – Part I : What’s the best data processing system?

April 27, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 18 Comments

Musketeer: all for one, one for all in data processing systems - Gog et al. 2015 For between 40-80% of the jobs submitted to MapReduce systems, you'd be better off just running them on a single machine... It was Eurosys 2015 last week, and a great new crop of papers were presented. Gog et al. ... Continue Reading

The Scalable Commutativity Rule: Designing Scalable Software for Multicore Processors

April 24, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

The Scalable Commutativity Rule: Designing Scalable Software for Multicore Processors - Clements et al. 2013 The way you design your interface (API) has a significant impact on the scalability you can achieve with any implementation. Clements et al. define the Scalable Commutativity Rule - which will look familiar to those who study distributed systems - ... Continue Reading

From the Aether to the Ethernet – Attacking the Internet using Broadcast Digital Television

April 23, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

From the Aether to the Ethernet - Attacking the Internet using Broadcast Digital Television - Oren & Koremytis 2014 Before reading any further, please ensure you are in a carpeted area or other soft ground. Your jaw may hit the floor a few times when you hear what Oren & Koremytis have to tell us, ... Continue Reading

Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems

April 22, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments

Distributed Snapshots: Determining Global States of Distributed Systems - Chandy & Lamport 1985. What state is your distributed system in? In the absence of a universal clock, is that even a well-formed question? And if you could take a distributed snapshot of system state, would that be useful? Through an algorithm that has simply become ... Continue Reading

Declarative Interaction Design for Data Visualization

April 21, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Declarative Interaction Design for Data Visualization - Satyanarayan et al. 2015 We've looked at the power of declarative approaches before when it comes to data and distribution (The Declarative Imperative, Bloom, Edelweiss, and of course let's not forget SQL itself!); today's paper applies a declarative approach to interactive data visualizations. With thanks to Dion Almaer ... Continue Reading

Making Sense of Performance in Data Analytics Frameworks

April 20, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Making Sense of Performance in Data Analytics Frameworks - Ousterhout et al. 2015 We all know the causes of poor performance in big data analytics workloads: network I/O, disk I/O, and straggler tasks. Ousterhout et al. set out to try and quantify this, and found that what we think we know isn't necessarily so. Yet ... Continue Reading

Asynchronized Concurrency: The Secret to Scaling Concurrent Search Data Structures

April 17, 2015 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Asynchronized Concurrency: The Secret to Scaling Concurrent Search Data Structures - David et al. 2015 Linked Lists, Hash Tables, Skip Lists, Binary Search Trees... these data structures are core to many programs. This paper studies such search data structures, supporting search, insert, and remove operations. In particular, the authors look at concurrent versions of these ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

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

Month: April 2015