FaSST: Fast, scalable and simple distributed transactions with two-sided (RDMA) datagram RPCs

FaSST: Fast, scalable and simple distributed transactions with two-sided (RDMA) datagram rpcs Kalia et al., OSDI 2016 Back in January I wrote a short piece entitled ‘All change please’ looking at some of the hardware changes making their way to our datacenters and the implications. One of those changes is super-fast networking (as exploited by ... Continue Reading

Diamond: Automating data management and storage for wide-area, reactive applications

Diamond: Automating data management and storage for wide-area, reactive applications Zhang et al., OSDI 2016 Diamond tackles the end-to-end problem of building reactive applications, defined here as those that update end-user visible state without requiring any explicit user action: … today’s popular applications are reactive: they provide users with the illusion of continuous synchronization across ... Continue Reading

Just say NO to Paxos overhead: replacing consensus with network ordering

Just say NO to Paxos overhead: replacing consensus with network ordering Li et al., OSDI 2016 Everyone knows that consensus systems such as Paxos, Viewstamped Replication, and Raft impose high overhead and have limited throughput and scalability. Li et al. carefully examine the assumptions on which those systems are based, and finds out that within ... Continue Reading

REX: A development platform and online learning approach for runtime emergent software systems

REX: A development platform and online learning approach for runtime emergent software systems Porter et al. OSDI 2016 If you can get beyond the (for my taste, ymmv) somewhat grand claims and odd turns of phrase (e.g., “how the software ‘feels’ at a given point in time” => metrics) then there’s something quite interesting at ... Continue Reading