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

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

The Network is Reliable

The Network is Reliable - Bailis and Kingsbury 2014 This must be the easiest paper summary to write of the series so far. The network is reliable? Oh no it isn't... OK, here's a little more detail :) Network reliability matters because it prevents us from having reliable communication, and that in turn makes building ... Continue Reading