Incremental knowledge base construction using DeepDive

Incremental knowledge base construction using DeepDive Shin et al., VLDB 2015 When I think about the most important CS foundations for the computer systems we build today and will build over the next decade, I think about Distributed systems Database systems / data stores (dealing with data at rest) Stream processing (dealing with data in … Continue reading Incremental knowledge base construction using DeepDive

Simple testing can prevent most critical failures

Simple testing can prevent most critical failures: an analysis of production failures in distributed data-intensive systems Yuan et al. OSDI 2014 After yesterday's paper I needed something a little easier to digest today, and 'Simple testing can prevent most critical failures' certainly hit the spot. Thanks to Caitie McCaffrey from whom I first heard about … Continue reading Simple testing can prevent most critical failures

Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?

Why does deep and cheap learning work so well Lin & Tegmark 2016 Deep learning works remarkably well, and has helped dramatically improve the state-of-the-art in areas ranging from speech recognition, translation, and visual object recognition to drug discovery, genomics, and automatic game playing. However, it is still not fully understood why deep learning works … Continue reading Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?

Cyclades: Conflict-free asynchronous machine learning

CYCLADES: Conflict-free asynchronous machine learning Pan et al. NIPS 2016 "Conflict-free," the magic words that mean we can process things concurrently or in parallel at full speed, with no need for coordination. Today's paper introduces Cyclades, a system for speeding up machine learning on a single NUMA node. In the evaluation, the authors used NUMA … Continue reading Cyclades: Conflict-free asynchronous machine learning

The load, capacity, and availability of quorum systems

The load, capacity, and availability of quorum systems Naor & Wool, SIAM J Computing 1998 Update: fixed 'non-intersection property' to read 'non-empty intersection property.' Quite an important difference! With thanks to those who pointed out my mistake. This is the paper that Howard et al referenced in Flexible Paxos as defining the “fundamental theorem of … Continue reading The load, capacity, and availability of quorum systems

Write-limited sorts and joins for persistent memory

Write-limited sorts and joins for persistent memory Viglas, VLDB 2014 This is the second of the two research-for-practice papers for this week. Once more the topic is how database storage algorithms can be optimised for NVM, this time examining the asymmetry between reads and writes on NVM. This is premised on Viglas’ assertion that: Writes … Continue reading Write-limited sorts and joins for persistent memory

Let’s talk about storage and recovery methods for non-volatile memory database systems

Let's talk about storage and recovery methods for non-volatile memory database systems Arulraj et al., SIGMOD 2015 Update: fixed a bunch of broken links. I can't believe I only just found out about this paper! It's exactly what I've been looking for in terms of an analysis of the impacts of NVM on data storage … Continue reading Let’s talk about storage and recovery methods for non-volatile memory database systems

Distributed consensus and the implications of NVM on database management systems

Distributed consensus and the implications of NVM on database management systems Fournier, Arulraj, & Pavlo ACM Queue Vol 14, issue 3 As you may recall, Peter Bailis and ACM Queue have started a "Research for Practice" series introducing "expert curated guides to the best of CS research." Aka, reading lists for The Morning Paper! I … Continue reading Distributed consensus and the implications of NVM on database management systems

Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited

Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited Howard et al., 2016 Paxos has been around for 18 (26) years now, and extensively studied. (For some background, see the 2 week mini-series on consensus that I put together last year). In this paper, Howard et al. make a simple(?) observation that has significant consequences for improving the fault-tolerance … Continue reading Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited