Stateless datacenter load-balancing with Beamer

May 3, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Stateless datacenter load-balancing with Beamer Olteanu et al., NSDI'18 We’ve spent the last couple of days looking at datacenter network infrastructure, but we didn’t touch on the topic of load balancing. For a single TCP connection, you want all of the packets to end up at the same destination. Logically, a load balancer (a.k.a. ‘mux’) ... Continue Reading

Andromeda: performance, isolation, and velocity at scale in cloud network virtualization

May 2, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Andromeda: performance, isolation, and velocity at scale in cloud network virtualization Dalton et al., NSDI'18 Yesterday we took a look at the Microsoft Azure networking stack, today it’s the turn of the Google Cloud Platform. (It’s a very handy coincidence to have two such experience and system design report papers appearing side by side so ... Continue Reading

Azure accelerated networking: SmartNICs in the public cloud

May 1, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Azure accelerated networking: SmartNICs in the public cloud Firestone et al., NSDI'18 We’re still on the ‘beyond CPUs’ theme today, with a great paper from Microsoft detailing their use of FPGAs to accelerate networking in Azure. Microsoft have been doing this since 2015, and hence this paper also serves as a wonderful experience report documenting ... Continue Reading

NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination

April 30, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 8 Comments

NetChain: Scale-free sub-RTT coordination Jin et al., NSDI'18 NetChain won a best paper award at NSDI 2018 earlier this month. By thinking outside of the box (in this case, the box is the chassis containing the server), Jin et al. have demonstrated how to build a coordination service (think Apache ZooKeeper) with incredibly low latency ... Continue Reading

SmoothOperator: reducing power fragmentation and improving power utilization in large-scale datacenters

April 27, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

SmoothOperator: reducing power fragmentation and improving power utilization in large-scale datacenters Hsu et al., ASPLOS'18 What do you do when your theory of constraints analysis reveals that power has become your major limiting factor? That is, you can’t add more servers to your existing datacenter(s) without blowing your power budget, and you don’t want to ... Continue Reading

Skyway: connecting managed heaps in distributed big data systems

April 26, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Skyway: connecting managed heaps in distributed big data systems Nguyen et al., ASPLOS'18 Yesterday we saw how to make Java objects persistent using NVM-backed heaps with Espresso. One of the drawbacks of using that as a persistence mechanism is that they’re only stored in the memory of a single node. If only there was some ... Continue Reading

Espresso: brewing Java for more non-volatility with non-volatile memory

April 25, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Espresso: brewing Java for more non-volatility with non-volatile memory Wu et al., ASPLOS'18 What happens when you introduce non-volatile memory (NVM) to the world of Java? In theory, with a heap backed by NVM, we should get persistence for free? It’s not quite that straightforward of course, but Espresso gets you pretty close. There are ... Continue Reading

Watching for software inefficiencies with Witch

April 24, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Watching for software inefficiencies with Witch Wen et al., ASPLOS'18 (The link above is to the ACM Digital Library, if you don’t have membership you should still be able to access the paper pdf by following the link from The Morning Paper blog post directly.) Inefficiencies abound in complex, layered software. These inefficiencies can arise ... Continue Reading

WSMeter: A performance evaluation methodology for Google’s production warehouse-scale computers

April 23, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

WSMeter: A performance evaluation methodology for Google’s production warehouse-scale computers Lee et al., ASPLOS'18 (The link above is to the ACM Digital Library, if you don’t have membership you should still be able to access the paper pdf by following the link from The Morning Paper blog post directly.) How do you know how well ... Continue Reading

The architectural implications of autonomous driving: constraints and acceleration

April 20, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

The architectural implications of autonomous driving: constraints and acceleration Lin et al., ASPLOS'18 Today’s paper is another example of complementing CPUs with GPUs, FPGAs, and ASICs in order to build a system with the desired performance. In this instance, the challenge is to build an autonomous self-driving car! Architecting autonomous driving systems is particularly challenging ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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