Edelweiss: Automatic storage reclamation for distributed programming - Conway et al. 2014 This is the final selection from Peter Alvaro is his desert island paper week, and what a great paper to finish on! Please don't let the title of this paper put you off! To be honest, the title didn't really grab my attention … Continue reading Edelweiss: Automatic storage reclamation for distributed programming
Broadcast disks: data management for asymmetric communication environments
Broadcast Disks: Data Management for Asymmetric Communication Environments - Acharya et al. 1997. (This is the fourth of Peter Alvaro's 'desert island paper' selections). Do you remember teletext? Before the web, this was the only on-demand information service for the general population. In the UK, we had the wonderful Ceefax. You would choose your page … Continue reading Broadcast disks: data management for asymmetric communication environments
TAG: A Tiny Aggregation Service for ad-hoc Sensor Networks
TAG: A Tiny Aggregation Service for ad-hoc Sensor Networks - Madden et al. 2002 ** updated broken link above ** This is the third in a series of 5 'desert island paper' selections from Peter Alvaro. The topics discussed in this paper seem so highly relevant to the current hope and excitement for the Internet … Continue reading TAG: A Tiny Aggregation Service for ad-hoc Sensor Networks
Generative Communication in Linda
Generative Communication in Linda - Gelernter 1985 This is the second of five papers selected by Peter Alvaro as part of his 'Desert Island papers' nominations. Generative communication is the basis of a new distributed programming language called Linda... Where most distributed languages are partially distributed in space and nondistributed in time, Linda is fully … Continue reading Generative Communication in Linda
Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment
Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment - Halpern & Moses '90 (initial version 1984). This is the first of five 'Desert island papers' chosen by Peter Alvaro, and what a great choice to kick the week off with. It's a long read, coming in at 36 pages (45 if you include the proofs … Continue reading Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment
Desert Island Papers: Peter Alvaro
There's a famous UK radio programme that's been running since 1942 called 'Desert Island Discs.' This is a programme in which "a well-known person is asked the question, if you were to be cast away alone on a desert island, which eight gramophone records would you choose to have with you, assuming of course, that … Continue reading Desert Island Papers: Peter Alvaro
The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems
The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems - Burrows '06 This paper describes the Chubby lock service at Google, which was designed as a coarse-grained locking service, found use mostly as a name service and configuration repository, and inspired the creation of Zookeeper. [Chubby's] design is based on well-known ideas that have meshed … Continue reading The Chubby lock service for loosely coupled distributed systems
Enterprise Database Applications and the Cloud: A difficult road ahead
Enterprise Database Applications and the Cloud: A difficult road ahead - Stonebraker et al. 2014 In the rush to the cloud, stateless application components are well catered for but state always makes things more complicated. In this paper, Stonebraker et al. set out some of the reasons enterprise database applications present challenges to cloud migration. … Continue reading Enterprise Database Applications and the Cloud: A difficult road ahead
Encapsulation of parallelism in the Volcano query processing system
Encapsulation of parallelism in the volcano query processing system - Graefe '89. You may have picked up on the throwaway line in the Impala paper: "The execution model is the traditional Volcano-style with Exchange operators." So what exactly is the 'traditional Volcano style', and what are 'exchange operators'? Today's choice is the paper that first … Continue reading Encapsulation of parallelism in the Volcano query processing system
Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box
Personal Data: Thinking inside the box - Haddadi et al. 2015. This paper got some coverage in the press recently with a story in the British newspaper "The Guardian" headlined "Fightback against internet giants' stranglehold on personal data starts here." Amongst the authors we also find Jon Crowcroft (who wrote yesterday's paper 'On the duality … Continue reading Personal Data: Thinking Inside the Box
the morning paper 