Month: August 2017

Adding concurrency to smart contracts

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Adding concurrency to smart contracts Dickerson et al., PODC'17 Yesterday we looked at how analogies from concurrent objects could help us understand smart contract behaviour. In today's paper choice from PODC'17 (which also has one Maurice Herlihy on the author list) we get to borrow some ideas from concurrent objects to increase the concurrency of ... Continue Reading

Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation

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Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation Crooks et al., PODC’17 This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of isolation levels, a topic we’ve looked at before and which contains quite a bit of complexity. The gold standard reference for understanding isolation is Adya’s Generalized isolation level definitions. Unlike the definitions ... Continue Reading

Towards deploying decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 9 Comments
Towards deploying decommissioned mobile devices as cheap energy-efficient compute nodes Shahrad & Wentzlaff, HotCloud'17 I have one simple rule when it comes to selecting papers for The Morning Paper: I only cover papers that I like and find interesting. There are some papers though, that manage to generate in me a genuine feeling of excitement, ... Continue Reading

Growing a protocol

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Growing a protocol Ramasubramanian et al., HotCloud'17 I've been really enjoying working my way through a selection of the HotCloud papers - they're relatively short, thought-provoking, and designed to promote discussion (each paper has a set of discussion questions at the very end - great if you're looking at them in a group of some ... Continue Reading

JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 10 Comments
JavaScript for extending low-latency in-memory key-value stores Zhang & Stutsman, HotCloud'17 Last year we looked at RAMCloud, an ultra-low latency key-value store combining DRAM and RDMA. (Also check out the team's work on patterns for writing distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant code and how to support linearizable multi-object transactions on RAMCloud with RIFL). Now the RAMCloud research ... Continue Reading

Paracloud: bringing application insight into cloud operations

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments
Paracloud: bringing application insight into cloud operations Nadgowda et al., HotCloud'17 We'll be looking at a selection of papers from HotCloud'17 this week. The HotCloud workshop focuses on new and emerging trends in cloud computing, and the CfP particularly encourages position papers that describe novel research directions and work that is in its formative stages. ... Continue Reading

Deep photo style transfer

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Deep photo style transfer Luan et al., arXiv 2017 Here's something a little fun for Friday: a collaboration between researchers at Cornell and Adobe, on photographic style transfer. Will we see something like this in a Photoshop of the future? In 2015 in the Neural Style Transfer paper ('A neural algorithm of artistic style'), Gatys ... Continue Reading