Orbital edge computing: nano satellite constellations as a new class of computer system

Orbital edge computing: nanosatellite constellations as a new class of computer system, Denby & Lucia, ASPLOS’20. Last time out we looked at the real-world deployment of 5G networks and noted the affinity between 5G and edge computing. In true Crocodile Dundee style, Denby and Lucia are entitled to say “that’s not the edge, this is the edge!”. Today’s paper … Continue reading Orbital edge computing: nano satellite constellations as a new class of computer system

Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption

Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption, Xu et al., SIGCOMM’20 We are standing on the eve of the 5G era… 5G, as a monumental shift in cellular communication technology, holds tremendous potential for spurring innovations across many vertical industries, with its promised multi-Gbps speed, sub-10 ms low … Continue reading Understanding operational 5G: a first measurement study on its coverage, performance and energy consumption

Toward an API for the real numbers

Towards an API for the real numbers, Boehm, PLDI’20 Last time out we saw that even in scientific computing applications built by experts, problems with floating point numbers are commonplace. The idiosyncrasies of floating point representations also show up in more everyday applications such as calculators and spreadsheets. Here the user-base is less inclined to be … Continue reading Toward an API for the real numbers

Spying on the floating point behavior of existing, unmodified scientific applications

Spying on the floating point behavior of existing, unmodified scientific applications Dinda et al., HPDC’20 It’s common knowledge that the IEEE standard floating point number representations used in modern computers have their quirks, for example not being able to accurately represent numbers such as 1/3, or 0.1. The wikipedia page on floating point numbers describes a … Continue reading Spying on the floating point behavior of existing, unmodified scientific applications

Static Analysis of Java Enterprise Applications: Frameworks and Caches, the Elephants in the Room

Static analysis of Java enterprise applications: frameworks and caches, the elephants in the room, Antoniadis et al., PLDI’20 Static analysis is a key component of many quality and security analysis tools. Being static, it has the advantage that analysis results can be produced solely from source code without the need to execute the program. This means … Continue reading Static Analysis of Java Enterprise Applications: Frameworks and Caches, the Elephants in the Room

Watchman: monitoring dependency conflicts for Python library ecosystem

Watchman: monitoring dependency conflicts for Python library ecosystemWang et al., ICSE ‘20 There are more than 1.4M Python libraries in the PyPI repository. Figuring out which combinations of those work well together is not always easy. In fact, we have a phrase for navigating the maze of dependencies modern projects seem to accumulate: “dependency hell”. … Continue reading Watchman: monitoring dependency conflicts for Python library ecosystem

Aligning superhuman AI with human behaviour: chess as a model systems

Aligning superhuman AI with human behavior: chess as a model system, McIlroy-Young et al., KDD’20 t’s been a while, but it’s time to start reading CS papers again! We’ll ease back into it with one or two papers a week for a few weeks, building back up to something like 3 papers a week at … Continue reading Aligning superhuman AI with human behaviour: chess as a model systems

Serverless in the wild: characterizing and optimising the serverless workload at a large cloud provider

Serverless in the wild: characterizing and optimising the serverless workload at a large cloud provider, Shahrad et al., arXiv 2020 This is a fresh-from-the-arXivs paper that Jonathan Mace (@mpi_jcmace) drew my attention to on Twitter last week, thank you Jonathan! It's a classic trade-off: the quality of service offered (better service presumably driving more volume … Continue reading Serverless in the wild: characterizing and optimising the serverless workload at a large cloud provider