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

Distributed consensus revised – Part II

May 8, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Distributed consensus revised (part II) Howard, PhD thesis In today’s post we’re going to be looking at chapter 3 of Dr Howard’s thesis, which is a tour ("systematisation of knowledge", SoK) of some of the major known revisions to the classic Paxos algorithm. Negative responses (NACKs) In classic Paxos acceptors only send replies to proposer ... Continue Reading

Distributed consensus revised – Part I

May 7, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Distributed consensus revised Howard, PhD thesis Welcome back to a new term of The Morning Paper! To kick things off, I’m going to start by taking a look at Dr Howard’s PhD thesis, ‘Distributed consensus revised’. This is obviously longer than a standard paper, so we’ll break things down over a few days. As the ... Continue Reading

End of term

April 22, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

We've reached the end of term again on The Morning Paper, and I'll be taking a two week break. The Morning Paper will resume on Tuesday 7th May (since Monday 6th is a public holiday in the UK). My end of term tradition is to highlight a few of the papers from the term that ... Continue Reading

Keeping master green at scale

April 18, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Keeping master green at scale Ananthanarayanan et al., EuroSys'19 This paper provides a fascinating look at a key part of Uber’s software delivery machine. With a monorepo, and many thousands of engineers concurrently committing changes, keeping the build green, and keeping commit-to-live latencies low, is a major challenge. This paper introduces a change management system ... Continue Reading

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking

April 17, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys'19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs environment, DSLabs, developed at the University of Washington to accompany a course in distributed systems. During the ten week course, students implement four different assignments: an exactly-once ... Continue Reading

Time protection: the missing OS abstraction

April 15, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 11 Comments

Time protection: the missing OS abstraction Ge et al., EuroSys'19 Ever since the prominent emergence of timing-based microarchitectural attacks (e.g. Spectre, Meltdown, and friends) I’ve been wondering what we can do about them. When a side-channel is based on observing improved performance, a solution that removes the improved performance can work, but is clearly undesirable. ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

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

Uncategorized