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
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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
What’s happening with The Morning Paper?
I hope things have been going well for you during the various stages of covid-19 lockdowns. In the UK where I am things are just starting to ease, although it looks like I’ll still be working remotely for a considerable time to come. Lockdown so far has been bittersweet for me. Two deaths in my … Continue reading What’s happening with The Morning Paper?
An early end of term
The last few weeks have been anything but normal for many of us. I do hope that you and your loved ones are managing to stay safe. My routines have been disrupted too, and with the closure of schools last week it's essentially the Easter holidays one week earlier than expected for my children. At … Continue reading An early end of term
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
An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory
An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory, Yang et al., FAST'20 We've looked at multiple papers exploring non-volatile main memory and its implications (e.g. most recently 'Efficient lock-free durable sets'). One thing they all had in common is an evaluation using some kind of simulation of the expected behaviour of … Continue reading An empirical guide to the behavior and use of scalable persistent memory
Understanding, detecting and localizing partial failures in large system software
Understanding, detecting and localizing partial failures in large system software, Lou et al., NSDI'20 Partial failures (gray failures) occur when some but not all of the functionalities of a system are broken. On the surface everything can appear to be fine, but under the covers things may be going astray. When a partial failure occurs, … Continue reading Understanding, detecting and localizing partial failures in large system software
the morning paper 