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 ... Continue Reading

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

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 ... Continue Reading

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 ... Continue Reading

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

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

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