The Part-Time Parliament - Lamport '90/'98 This is part 2 of a 10-part series on consensus. There's quite the back story to this paper. First submitted in 1990, researchers at the time didn't seem to take it seriously due to its presentation as an allegory, and failed to appreciate the fundamental contribution that we know … Continue reading The Part-Time Parliament
Category: Distributed Systems
Core distributed systems topics, for example consistency, availability and so on.
Viewstamped replication: A new primary copy method to support highly available distributed systems
Viewstamped replication: A new primary copy method to support highly available distributed systems - Oki & Liskov '88. Given a set of co-operating nodes that form a group, how can we replicate information to group members and maintain a consistent "one copy serializability" property as group members come and go? Oki and Liskov introduce two … Continue reading Viewstamped replication: A new primary copy method to support highly available distributed systems
RIPQ: Advanced photo caching on flash for Facebook
RIPQ: Advanced Photo Caching on Flash for Facebook - Tang et al. 2015 It's three for the price of one with this paper: we get to deepen our understanding of the characteristics of flash, examine a number of priority queue and caching algorithms, and get a glimpse into what's behind an important part of Facebook's … Continue reading RIPQ: Advanced photo caching on flash for Facebook
Edelweiss: Automatic storage reclamation for distributed programming
Edelweiss: Automatic storage reclamation for distributed programming - Conway et al. 2014 This is the final selection from Peter Alvaro is his desert island paper week, and what a great paper to finish on! Please don't let the title of this paper put you off! To be honest, the title didn't really grab my attention … Continue reading Edelweiss: Automatic storage reclamation for distributed programming
Broadcast disks: data management for asymmetric communication environments
Broadcast Disks: Data Management for Asymmetric Communication Environments - Acharya et al. 1997. (This is the fourth of Peter Alvaro's 'desert island paper' selections). Do you remember teletext? Before the web, this was the only on-demand information service for the general population. In the UK, we had the wonderful Ceefax. You would choose your page … Continue reading Broadcast disks: data management for asymmetric communication environments
Generative Communication in Linda
Generative Communication in Linda - Gelernter 1985 This is the second of five papers selected by Peter Alvaro as part of his 'Desert Island papers' nominations. Generative communication is the basis of a new distributed programming language called Linda... Where most distributed languages are partially distributed in space and nondistributed in time, Linda is fully … Continue reading Generative Communication in Linda
Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment
Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment - Halpern & Moses '90 (initial version 1984). This is the first of five 'Desert island papers' chosen by Peter Alvaro, and what a great choice to kick the week off with. It's a long read, coming in at 36 pages (45 if you include the proofs … Continue reading Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment
The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems
The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems - Burrows '06 This paper describes the Chubby lock service at Google, which was designed as a coarse-grained locking service, found use mostly as a name service and configuration repository, and inspired the creation of Zookeeper. [Chubby's] design is based on well-known ideas that have meshed … Continue reading The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems
On the duality of resilience and privacy
On the duality of resilience and privacy - Crowcroft '15 Somewhat of a philosophical start to the week this week as Jon Crowcroft makes the argument for greater privacy through some of the same mechanisms that give systems greater resilience. Plus, it includes this quote: It is a truth universally acknowledged that centralized cloud services … Continue reading On the duality of resilience and privacy
Liquid: Unifying nearline and offline big data integration
Liquid: Unifying Nearline and Offline Big Data Integration - Fernandez et al. 2015 This is post 3 of 5 in a series looking at the latest research from the CIDR '15 conference. Also in the series so far this week: 'The missing piece in complex analytics' and 'WANalytics: analytics for a geo-distributed, data intensive world'. … Continue reading Liquid: Unifying nearline and offline big data integration
the morning paper 