Distributed Systems

Core distributed systems topics, for example consistency, availability and so on.

Global Sequence Protocol

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Global Sequence Protocol: A Robust Abstraction for Replicated Shared State - Burckhardt et al. 2015 This is the ECOOP '15 paper that we've been building up to so far this week. The problem domain is the familiar desire to support replicated shared data across nodes (mobile devices here) with eventual consistency. In the mobile context, ... Continue Reading

Cloud Types for Eventual Consistency

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Cloud Types for Eventual Consistency - Burckhardt et al. 2012 Providing good programming abstractions for cloud storage, synchronization, and disconnected operation appears crucial to accelerate the production of useful and novel applications on today’s and tomorrow’s mobile devices. This paper proposes a model based on cloud types (which may be integrated with a programming language). ... Continue Reading

Eventually Consistent Transactions

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Eventually Consistent Transactions - Burckhardt et al. 2012 There's another ECOOP'15 paper I'd like to cover this week - Burckhardt et al.'s "Global Sequence Protocol." But that paper builds on the notion of Cloud Types (similar in spirit to CRDTs, and not something I've personally come across before), which in turn builds on work on ... Continue Reading

Heracles: Improving Resource Efficiency at Scale

~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment
Heracles: Improving Resource Efficiency at Scale - Lo et al. 2015 Until recently, scaling from Moore’s law provided higher compute per dollar with every server generation, allowing datacenters to scale without raising the cost. However, with several imminent challenges in technology scaling, alternate approaches are needed. Those approaches involve increasing server utilization, which is still ... Continue Reading