A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices

May 31, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

A case for lease-based, utilitarian resource management on mobile devices Hu et al., ASPLOS'19 I’ve chosen another energy-related paper to end the week, addressing a problem many people can relate to: apps that drain your battery. LeaseOS borrows the concept of a lease from distributed systems, but with a rather nice twist, and is able ... Continue Reading

Boosted race trees for low energy classification

May 29, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Boosted race trees for low energy classification Tzimpragos et al., ASPLOS'19 We don’t talk about energy as often as we probably should on this blog, but it’s certainly true that our data centres and various IT systems consume an awful lot of it. So it’s interesting to see a paper using nano-Joules per prediction as ... Continue Reading

CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment

May 28, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

CheriABI: enforcing valid pointer provenance and minimizing pointer privilege in the POSIX C run-time environment Davis et al., ASPLOS'19 Last week we saw the benefits of rethinking memory and pointer models at the hardware level when it came to object storage and compression (Zippads). CHERI also rethinks the way that pointers and memory work, but ... Continue Reading

Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy

May 24, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 14 Comments

Compress objects, not cache lines: an object-based compressed memory hierarchy Tsai & Sanchez, ASPLOS'19 Last time out we saw how Google have been able to save millions of dollars though memory compression enabled via zswap. One of the important attributes of their design was easy and rapid deployment across an existing fleet. Today’s paper introduces ... Continue Reading

Software-defined far memory in warehouse scale computers

May 22, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 13 Comments

Software-defined far memory in warehouse-scale computers Lagar-Cavilla et al., ASPLOS'19 Memory (DRAM) remains comparatively expensive, while in-memory computing demands are growing rapidly. This makes memory a critical factor in the total cost of ownership (TCO) of large compute clusters, or as Google like to call them "Warehouse-scale computers (WSCs)." This paper describes a "far memory" ... Continue Reading

RPCValet: NI-driven tail-aware balancing of µs-scale RPCs

May 20, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

RPCValet: NI-driven tail-aware balancing of µs-scale RPCs Daglis et al., ASPLOS'19 Last week we learned about the [increased tail-latency sensitivity of microservices based applications with high RPC fan-outs. Seer uses estimates of queue depths to mitigate latency spikes on the order of 10-100ms, in conjunction with a cluster manager. Today’s paper choice, RPCValet, operates at ... Continue Reading

Understanding real-world concurrency bugs in Go

May 17, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 25 Comments

Understanding real-world concurrency bugs in Go Tu, Liu et al., ASPLOS'19 The design of a programming (or data) model not only makes certain problems easier (or harder) to solve, but also makes certain classes of bugs easier (or harder) to create, detect, and subsequently fix. Today’s paper choice studies concurrency mechanisms in Go. Before we ... Continue Reading

Seer: leveraging big data to navigate the complexity of performance debugging in cloud microservices

May 15, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Seer: leveraging big data to navigate the complexity of performance debugging in cloud microservices Gan et al., ASPLOS'19 Last time around we looked at the DeathStarBench suite of microservices-based benchmark applications and learned that microservices systems can be especially latency sensitive, and that hotspots can propagate through a microservices architecture in interesting ways. Seer is ... Continue Reading

An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems

May 13, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems Gan et al., ASPLOS'19 Microservices are well known for producing ‘death star’ interaction diagrams like those shown below, where each point on the circumference represents an individual service, and the lines between them represent interactions. Systems built with lots of ... Continue Reading

Distributed consensus revised – Part III

May 10, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Distributed consensus revised (part III) Howard, PhD thesis With all the ground work laid, the second half of the thesis progressively generalises the Paxos algorithm: weakening the quorum intersection requirements; reusing intersections to allow decisions to be reached with fewer participants; weakening the value selection rules; and sharing phases to take best advantage of the ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

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

Month: May 2019