Exploring Complex Networks

Exploring Complex Networks - Strogatz 2001 Network anatomy is important to characterize because structure always affects function... Written in 2001, this article - recently recommended by Werner Vogels in his 'Back-to-Basics' series - explores the topic of complex networks. It turns out that the behaviour of individual nodes, and the way that we connect them ... Continue Reading

FaRM: Fast Remote Memory

FaRM: Fast Remote Memory - Dragojevic, et al. 2014 Yesterday we looked at Facebook's graph store,TAO, that can handle a billion reads/sec and millions of writes/sec. In today's choice a team from Microsoft Research reimplemented TAO, and beat those numbers by an order of magnitude! FaRM’s per-machine throughput of 6.3 million operations per second is ... Continue Reading

Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance

Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance - Castro & Liskov 1999 Oh Byzantine, you conflict me. On the one hand, we know that the old model of a security perimeter around an undefended centre is hopelessly broken (witness Google moves its Corporate Applications to the Internet)- so Byzantine models, which allow for any deviation from expected behaviour ... Continue Reading