Month: January 2016

POPL 2016

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
Last month saw the 43rd edition of the ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on the Principles of Programming Languages (POPL). Gabriel Scherer did a wonderful job of gathering links to all of the accepted papers in a GitHub repo. For this week, I've chosen five papers from the conference that caught my eye. Links will go live ... Continue Reading

Panopticon: An Omniscient Lock Broker for Efficient Distributed Transactions in the Datacenter

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Panopticon: An Omniscient Lock Broker for Efficient Distributed Transactions in the Datacenter - Tasci & Demirbas, 2015 Today we return to the theme of distributed transactions, and a paper that won a best paper award from IEEE Big Data in 2015. Panopticon is a centralized lock broker (like Chubby and ZooKeeper) that manages distributed (decentralized) ... Continue Reading

Chimera: Large-Scale Classification Using Machine Learning, Rules, and Crowdsourcing

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
Chimera: Large-Scale Classification Using Machine Learning, Rules, and Crowdsourcing - Sun et al. 2014 (WalmartLabs) Large-scale classification, where we need to classify hundreds of thousands or millions of items into thousands of classes, is becoming increasingly common in this age of Big Data... So far, however, very little has been published on how large-scale classification ... Continue Reading

All Change Please

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments
Update: the DrTm results were for a 6-node cluster, not a 60-node cluster. Update: corrected the RAM Cloud tpmC number - previously missing a crucial 'K' ! The combined changes in networking, memory, storage, and processors that are heading towards our data centers will bring about profound changes to the way we design and build ... Continue Reading

Blurred Persistence: Efficient Transactions in Persistent Memory

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
Blurred Persistence: Efficient Transactions in Persistent Memory - Lu, Shu, & Sun, 2015 We had software transactional memory (STM), then hardware support for transactional memory (HTM), and now with persistent memory in which the memory plays the role of stable storage, we can have persistent transactional memory. And with persistent transactional memory, there's an issue ... Continue Reading

From ARIES to MARS: Transaction Support for Next-Generation Solid State Drives

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments
From ARIES to MARS: Transaction Support for Next-Generation Solid State Drives - Coburn et al. 2013 For the last couple of weeks we've been bouncing around the topics of transaction support and the implications of a non-volatile memory and super-fast networking on system design. We've seen statements such as 'the bandwidth and latency characteristics of ... Continue Reading