Cliffhanger: Scaling Performance Cliffs in Web Memory Caches

March 24, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Cliffhanger: Scaling Performance Cliffs in Web Memory Caches - Cidon et al. 2016 Cliffhanger continues yesterday's theme of efficient cache allocation policies when sharing cache resources. The paper focuses on a shared memcached service, where memory is divided between a number of slabs (each slab storing items with sizes in a specific range - e.g. ... Continue Reading

FairRide: Near-Optimal, Fair Cache Sharing

March 23, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

FairRide: Near-Optimal, Fair Cache Sharing - Pu et al. 2016 Yesterday we looked at a near-optimal packet scheduling algorithm (LSTF), today it's the turn of a near-optimal fair cache sharing algorithm. We're concerned with the scenario where a single cache resource is shared by multiple applications / users. Ideally we'd like three properties to hold: ... Continue Reading

Universal Packet Scheduling

March 22, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

Universal Packet Scheduling - Mittal et al. 2015 (presented at NSDI '16) Is there a universal scheduling algorithm, such that simply by changing its configuration parameters, we can produce any desired schedule? In Universal Packet Scheduling, Mittal et al. show us that in theory there can be no Universal Packet Scheduling (UPS) algorithm which achieves ... Continue Reading

Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer

March 21, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer - Eisenbud et al. 2016 Maglev is Google's software load balancer used within all their datacenters. It offers greater scalability and availability than hardware load balancers, enables quick iteration, and is much easier to upgrade. Maglev is a just another distributed system running on the commodity ... Continue Reading

Distributed TensorFlow with MPI

March 18, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Distributed TensorFlow with MPI - Vishnu et al. 2016 A short early release paper to close out the week this week, which looks at how to support machine learning and data mining (MLDM) with Google's TensorFlow in a distributed setting. The paper also contains some good background on TensorFlow itself as well as MPI - ... Continue Reading

HyperLogLog in Practice: Algorithmic Engineering of a State of the Art Cardinality Estimation Algorithm

March 17, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

HyperLogLog in Practice: Algorithmic Engineering of a State of the Art Cardinality Estimation Algorithm - Heule et al. 2013 Continuing on the theme of approximations from yesterday, today's paper looks at what must be one of the best known approximate data structures after the Bloom Filter, HyperLogLog. It's HyperLogLog with a twist though - a ... Continue Reading

MacroBase: Analytic Monitoring for the Internet of Things

March 16, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

MacroBase: Analytic Monitoring for the Internet of Things - Bailis et al. 2016 It looks like Peter Alvaro is not the only one to be doing some industrial collaboration recently! MacroBase is the result of Peter Bailis' collaboration with Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), an IoT company. The topic at hand is analytic monitoring - detecting ... Continue Reading

A Taxonomy of Attacks and a Survey of Defence Mechanisms for Semantic Social Engineering Attacks

March 15, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

A Taxonomy of Attacks and a Survey of Defence Mechanisms for Semantic Social Engineering Attacks - Heartfield and Loukas 2015 This paper is concerned with semantic social engineering: the manipulation of the user-computer interface to deceive a user and ultimately breach a computer system's information security. Semantic attack exploits include phishing, file masquerading (disguising file ... Continue Reading

Secrets, Lies, and Account Recovery: Lessons from the Use of Personal Knowledge Questions at Google

March 14, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Secrets, Lies, and Account Recovery: Lessons from the Use of Personal Knowledge Questions at Google - Bonneau et al. 2015 What was your mother's maiden name? What was your city of birth? What was the name of your first school? I don't know about you, but I always groan inwardly when a website asks such ... Continue Reading

Strategic Dialogue Management via Deep Reinforcement Learning

March 11, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Strategic Dialogue Management via Deep Reinforcement Learning - Cuayahuitl et al. 2015 If computers learning to play Atari arcade games by themselves isn't really your thing, perhaps you're more into board games? How about a Deep Reinforcement Learning system that learns how to trade effectively in Settlers of Catan! Again, we're not talking about a ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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