Month: November 2015

SoK: Eternal War in Memory

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
SoK: Eternal War in Memory - Szekeres et al. 2013 SoK stands for 'Systematization of Knowledge' - and in this case Szekeres et al. provide a wonderful conceptual framework and overview of memory corruption attacks and the defenses against them. As you'll see, defending against these attacks is non-trivial - especially if you are concerned ... Continue Reading

Asynchronous Complex Analytics in a Distributed Dataflow Architecture

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments
Asynchronous Complex Analytics in a Distributed Dataflow Architecture - Gonzalez et al. 2015 Here's a theme we've seen before: the programming model offered by large scale distributed systems doesn't always lend itself to efficient algorithms for solving certain classes of problems. In today's paper, Gonzalez et al. examine the growing gap between efficient machine learning ... Continue Reading

Hashed and Hierarchical Timing Wheels: Data Structures for the Efficient Implementation of a Timer Facility

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
Hashed and Hierarchical Timing Wheels: Data Structures for the Efficient Implementation of a Timer Facility - Varghese & Lauck 1987 Yashiro Matsuda recently wrote a blog post describing Apache Kafka's use of Hierarchical Timing Wheels to keep track of large numbers of outstanding requests. In the Kafka use case, each request lives in a 'purgatory' ... Continue Reading