How do committees invent?, Conway, Datamation magazine 1968 With thanks to Chris Frost for recommending this paper - another great example of a case where we all know the law (Conway's law in this case), but many of us have not actually read the original ideas behind it. We're back in 1968, a time when … Continue reading How do committees invent?
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A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space
A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space, Bittman et al., HotStorage 2019. This is a companion paper to the "persistent problem" piece that we looked at earlier this week, going a little deeper into the object pointer representation choices and the mapping of a virtual object space into physical address spaces. ...software … Continue reading A tale of two abstractions: the case for object space
A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM
A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM Bittman et al., PLOS'19 At the start of November I was privileged to attend HPTS (the High Performance Transaction Systems) conference in Asilomar. If you ever get the chance to go, I highly recommend it. It’s a comparatively small gathering with a great mix of people, and fabulous … Continue reading A persistent problem: managing pointers in NVM
Benchmarking spreadsheet systems
Benchmarking spreadsheet systems Rahman et al., Preprint A recent TwThread drew my attention to this pre-print paper. When spreadsheets were originally conceived, data and formula were input by hand and so everything operated at human scale. Increasingly we’re dealing with larger and larger datasets — for example, data imported via csv files — and spreadsheets … Continue reading Benchmarking spreadsheet systems
Declarative assembly of web applications from pre-defined concepts
Declarative assembly of web applications from predefined concepts De Rosso et al., Onward! 2019 I chose this paper to challenge my own thinking. I’m not really a fan of low-code / no-code / just drag-and-drop-from-our-catalogue forms of application development. My fear is that all too often it’s like jumping on a motorbike and tearing off … Continue reading Declarative assembly of web applications from pre-defined concepts
Efficient lock-free durable sets
Efficient lock-free durable sets Zuriel et al., OOPSLA'19 Given non-volatile memory (NVRAM), the naive hope for persistence is that it would be a no-op: what happens in memory, stays in memory. Unfortunately, a very similar set of issues to those concerned with flushing volatile memory to persistent disk exist here too, just at another level. … Continue reading Efficient lock-free durable sets
TLA+ model checking made symbolic
TLA+ model checking made symbolic Konnov et al., OOPSLA'19 TLA+ is a formal specification language (Temporal Logic of Actions) particularly well suited to reasoning about distributed algorithms. In addition to the specification language, the TLA+ toolset includes a model checker (TLC) and a theorem prover (TLAPS). Given the huge state spaces involved in many real-world … Continue reading TLA+ model checking made symbolic
Mergeable replicated data types – Part II
Mergeable replicated data types - part II Kaki et al., OOPLSA '19 Last time out we saw how Mergeable Replicated Data Types (MRDTs) use a bijection between the natural domain of a data type and relational sets to define merge semantics between two concurrently modified versions given their lowest common ancestor (LCA). Today we’re picking … Continue reading Mergeable replicated data types – Part II
Mergeable replicated data types – Part I
Mergeable replicated data types Kaki et al., OOPSLA'19 This paper was published at OOPSLA, but perhaps it’s amongst the distributed systems community that I expect there to be the greatest interest. Mergeable Replicated Data Types (MRDTs) are in the same spirit as CRDTs but with the very interesting property that they compose. Furthermore, a principled … Continue reading Mergeable replicated data types – Part I
PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments
PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments Tosch et al., OOPSLA'19 It’s easy to make experimental design mistakes that invalidate your online controlled experiments. At an organisation like Facebook (who kindly supplied the corpus of experiments used in this study), the state of art is to have a pool of experts carefully review … Continue reading PlanAlyzer: assessing threats to the validity of online experiments
the morning paper 