A higher order estimate of the optimum checkpoint interval for restart dumps - Daly 2004 TL;DR: if you know how long it takes your system to create a checkpoint/snapshot (δ), and you know the expected mean-time between failures (M), then set the checkpoint interval to be √(2δM) - δ. OK, I grant that today's paper … Continue reading A higher order estimate of the optimum checkpoint interval for restart dumps
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A Bridging Model for Parallel Computation
A Bridging Model for Parallel Computation - Valiant 1990 We've seen a lot of references to the 'Bulk Synchronous Parallel' model over the last two weeks. When it was conceived by Valiant in 1990 though, it was intended as a much more general model than simply an abstraction to support graph processing. As the von … Continue reading A Bridging Model for Parallel Computation
Exploring Complex Networks
Exploring Complex Networks - Strogatz 2001 Network anatomy is important to characterize because structure always affects function... Written in 2001, this article - recently recommended by Werner Vogels in his 'Back-to-Basics' series - explores the topic of complex networks. It turns out that the behaviour of individual nodes, and the way that we connect them … Continue reading Exploring Complex Networks
Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations
How to Quantify Scalability: The Universal Scalability Law (USL) - Gunther Update: corrected sign in USL equation - many thanks to Rob Fielding for pointing out the error. TL;DR: The Universal Scalability Law, Little's Law, and Kingman's Formula can tell you a lot about the behaviour of your systems, and also your organisation. From these … Continue reading Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations
Asynchronized Concurrency: The Secret to Scaling Concurrent Search Data Structures
Asynchronized Concurrency: The Secret to Scaling Concurrent Search Data Structures - David et al. 2015 Linked Lists, Hash Tables, Skip Lists, Binary Search Trees... these data structures are core to many programs. This paper studies such search data structures, supporting search, insert, and remove operations. In particular, the authors look at concurrent versions of these … Continue reading Asynchronized Concurrency: The Secret to Scaling Concurrent Search Data Structures
Sirius: An open end-to-end voice and vision personal assistant and its implications for future warehouse scale computers
Sirius: An Open end-to-end Voice and Vision Personal Assistant and its Implications for Future Warehouse Scale Computers - Hauswald et al. 2015 Welcome back to The Morning Paper! I hope you managed to catch-up on same of your backlog over the last two weeks since normal service is resumed as of today. To kick things … Continue reading Sirius: An open end-to-end voice and vision personal assistant and its implications for future warehouse scale computers
End of Term! (and how I read a paper…)
It's been a real pleasure interacting with so many of you that read The Morning Paper. Some of you have told me that you read it in the morning, but others save it for lunchtime, or even to wind down after work. Some forward it around their teams to encourage broader awareness, and many of … Continue reading End of Term! (and how I read a paper…)
Can’t we all just agree?
(Post updated to add links to write-ups of the papers now that the series is complete). We had to get here at some point! Inspired by the recent publication of Raft Refloated I thought it would be a good time to do a mini-series on consensus. Initially I'd planned out a series of 5 papers … Continue reading Can’t we all just agree?
F2FS: A new file system for flash storage
F2FS: A New File System for Flash Storage - Lee et al. 2015 For the second half of February's research conference highlights, we're visiting FAST '15, the File and Storage Technologies conference. We've seen a few statements so far in this series that Flash storage has the potential to be very disruptive. But beyond the … Continue reading F2FS: A new file system for flash storage
Information-Flow Analysis of Android Applications in DroidSafe
Information-Flow Analysis of Android Applications in DroidSafe - Gordon et al. 2015 This is the first of three papers we'll be looking at this week from the NDSS'15 conference that took place earlier this month. DroidSafe is a tool that looks for potential leaks of sensitive information in Android applications. And it works incredibly well! … Continue reading Information-Flow Analysis of Android Applications in DroidSafe
the morning paper 