Distributed Information Processing in Biological and Computational Systems - Navlakah & Bar-Joseph 2015 With thanks to Mark Allen for pointing me at today's paper choice via twitter. This is the last of the posts in the 'nature-inspired' series for a while, and we're moving on from optimisation problems to look at the way we build … Continue reading Distributed Information Processing in Biological and Computational Systems
Tag: Networking
Networks and networking.
Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network
Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google's Datacenter Network - Singh et. al (Google) 2015 Let's end the week with something completely different: a look at ten years and five generations of networking within Google's datacenters. Bandwidth demands within the datacenter are doubling every 12-15 months, even faster than the … Continue reading Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s Datacenter Network
Congestion Avoidance and Control
Congestion Avoidance and Control - Jacobson & Karels, 1988 (** corrected spelling of Jacobs_o_n **) It's October 1986 and there's trouble on the internet. A congestion collapse has reduced the bandwidth between LBL and UC Berkeley by a factor of a thousand. These two sites happened to be 400 yds apart. And that drop in … Continue reading Congestion Avoidance and Control
FaRM: Fast Remote Memory
FaRM: Fast Remote Memory - Dragojevic, et al. 2014 Yesterday we looked at Facebook's graph store,TAO, that can handle a billion reads/sec and millions of writes/sec. In today's choice a team from Microsoft Research reimplemented TAO, and beat those numbers by an order of magnitude! FaRM’s per-machine throughput of 6.3 million operations per second is … Continue reading FaRM: Fast Remote Memory
FastRoute: A scalable load-aware anycast routing architecture for modern CDNs
FastRoute: A scalable load-aware anycast routing architecture for modern CDNs - Flavel et al. 2015 This is the story of how a team at Microsoft redesigned their CDN that supports 'numerous popular online services.' It's also a great example of mature systems thinking: the team deliberately eschew designs that would give marginally better performance at … Continue reading FastRoute: A scalable load-aware anycast routing architecture for modern CDNs
The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch
The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch - Pfaff et al. 2015 Another selection from this month's NSDI 2015 programme, this time from the operational systems track. What inspired the creation of Open vSwitch? What has most influenced its design? And what's next? As virtualized (or containerized) workloads grew, physically provisioning networks to support them … Continue reading The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch
Queues don’t matter when you can JUMP them
Queues don't matter when you can JUMP them - Grosvenor et al. 2015 The Cambridge Systems at Scale team are on a roll. Hot on the heels of the excellent Musketeer paper from Eurosys 2015 comes this paper on QJUMP which last week won a best paper award at NSDI'15. Distributed systems design involves trade-offs. … Continue reading Queues don’t matter when you can JUMP them
Taming uncertainty in distributed systems with help from the network
Taming uncertainty in distributed systems with help from the network - Leners et al. 2015 Albatross is a membership service with a very interesting new twist: it exploits SDN functionality to actively enforce partitions! Perhaps it is not immediately obvious why that might be a good thing :). It turns out there are several benefits: … Continue reading Taming uncertainty in distributed systems with help from the network
Cross-layer scheduling in cloud systems
Cross-layer scheduling in cloud systems - Alkaff et al. 2015 This paper was presented last month at the 2015 International Conference on Cloud Engineering, and explores what happens when you coordinate application scheduling with network route allocation via SDN (hence: cross-layer scheduling). With clusters of 30 nodes, the authors demonstrate results that can improve the … Continue reading Cross-layer scheduling in cloud systems
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
the morning paper 