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

September 29, 2016November 11, 2019 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

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

Shielding applications from an untrusted cloud with Haven

June 16, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 5 Comments

Shielding applications from an untrusted cloud with Haven Baumann et al. OSDI 2014 Our objective is to run existing server applications in the cloud with a level of trust and security roughly equivalent to a user operating their own hardware in a locked cage at a colocation facility. We're all familiar with the idea of ... Continue Reading

Efficiently compiling efficient query plans for modern hardware

May 23, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware- Neumann, VLDB 2011 Updated with direct links to Databricks blog post now that it is published. A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to chat with Reynold Xin and Richard Garris from Databricks / Spark at RedisConf, where we were both giving talks. Reynold and ... Continue Reading

NOVA: A Log-Structured File System for Hybrid Volatile/Non-Volatile Main Memories

May 6, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

NOVA: A Log-structured file system for hybrid volatile/non-volatile main memories - Xu & Swanson 2016 Another paper looking at the design implications of mixed DRAM and NVMM systems (it's the future!), this time in the context of file systems. (NVMM = Non-volatile Main Memory). Hybrid DRAM/NVMM storage systems present a host of opportunities and challenges ... Continue Reading

Data Tiering in Heterogeneous Memory Systems

April 28, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Data Tiering in Heterogeneous Memory Systems - Dulloor et al. 2016 Another fantastic EuroSys 2016 paper for today, and one with results that are of great importance in understanding the cost and performance implications of the new generation of non-volatile memory (NVM) heading to our data centers soon. Furthermore, we also get some great insight ... Continue Reading

Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures

February 19, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures - Popek & Goldberg 1974. With thanks to Alfred Bratterud for pointing me at this paper. What exactly is a virtual machine? What does a virtual machine monitor do? And how do we now whether a given piece of hardware can support virtualization or not? In today's paper ... Continue Reading

Modelling the ARM v8 Architecture, Operationally: Concurrency and ISA

February 2, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Modelling the ARM v8 Architecture, Operationally: Concurrency and ISA - Flur et al. 2016 You can take all the care you like specifying, implementing, and verifying your software, but if the hardware it runs on is ill-defined at the end of the day you're just building on sand. In today's paper choice, Flur et al. ... Continue Reading

All Change Please

January 22, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments

Update: the DrTm results were for a 6-node cluster, not a 60-node cluster. Update: corrected the RAM Cloud tpmC number - previously missing a crucial 'K' ! The combined changes in networking, memory, storage, and processors that are heading towards our data centers will bring about profound changes to the way we design and build ... Continue Reading

Blurred Persistence: Efficient Transactions in Persistent Memory

January 21, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 4 Comments

Blurred Persistence: Efficient Transactions in Persistent Memory - Lu, Shu, & Sun, 2015 We had software transactional memory (STM), then hardware support for transactional memory (HTM), and now with persistent memory in which the memory plays the role of stable storage, we can have persistent transactional memory. And with persistent transactional memory, there's an issue ... Continue Reading

From ARIES to MARS: Transaction Support for Next-Generation Solid State Drives

January 20, 2016 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 6 Comments

From ARIES to MARS: Transaction Support for Next-Generation Solid State Drives - Coburn et al. 2013 For the last couple of weeks we've been bouncing around the topics of transaction support and the implications of a non-volatile memory and super-fast networking on system design. We've seen statements such as 'the bandwidth and latency characteristics of ... Continue Reading

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer
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