Effective Papers

This paper is by Shuai Mu, Lamont Nelson, Wyatt Lloyd, and Jinyang Li and it appeared in OSDI 2016. This paper presents Janus, another two-in-one shampoo & conditioner solution. Why deal with providing a solution for replication and another solution layered on top for transaction ordering when you can do both together in less time with a unified solution?  TAPIR had investigated this question first, and Janus does a followup. Instead of using the general transaction model considered in TAPIR, Janus uses one shot transactions, where each transaction contains multiple pieces and each piece has one read/write operation on a single key.  This reduced power transaction model allows Janus to implement an abort-free transaction ordering capability. A novel insight in Janus is that it notices it is possible to consolidate replication ordering and transaction ordering using the same setup. To order the transactions and replication alike, Janus takes a dependency graph tracking ap...

For the Fall semester distributed systems seminar, we will discuss these papers: Bipartisan Paxos: A Family of Fast, Leaderless, Modular State Machine Replication Protocols eXtreme Modelling in Practice     Starling: A Scalable Query Engine on Cloud Function Services Lambada: Interactive Data Analytics on Cold Data using Serverless Cloud Infrastructure   Tiered Replication: A Cost-effective Alternative to Full Cluster Geo-replication   Scalable State-Machine Replication   Designing Distributed Systems Using Approximate Synchrony in Data Center Networks   Armada: Low-Effort Verification of High-Performance Concurrent Programs   Ocean Vista: Gossip-Based Visibility Control for Speedy Geo-Distributed Transactions   Consolidating Concurrency Control and Consensus for Commits under Conflicts    Tales of the Tail: Hardware, OS, and Application-level Sources of Tail Latency   Near-Optimal Latency Versus Cost Tradeoffs in Geo-Distributed St...

We did our first Zoom DistSys reading group meeting on April 1st, Wednesday 15:30 EST. We discussed the Gryff paper . I didn't have much Zoom  experience, and this was very experimental reaching out to the world at large to run a reading group with whomever is interested. 20 people attended.  As I was introducing the format, one person starting writing chat messages, saying "this is so boring", etc.  He had connected with a phone, and the video was showing him walking probably in a market. This should have been a red flag. The meeting participants asked me to remove him, because he was pinging them and bothering them as well. That was our troll. I had taken measures to stop zoom-bombing, since I had heard this was an issue. Only the hosts and cohosts could share screen.  I made two co-hosts to help with moderation.  I had selected the option to disallow joining after removal. I removed the troll, and there was no incidents after that. The meeting took 90 minutes...

Below is the first draft list of papers I plan to discuss in my distributed systems seminar in the Spring semester. If you have some suggestions on some good/recent papers to cover, please let me know. Paxos Canopus: A Scalable and Massively Parallel Consensus Protocol  (CoNext17)  Consus taming the Paxi   Stable and consistent membership at scale with rapid  (ATC18) Unifying consensus and atomic commit  (VLDB19)  Wormspace: A modular foundation for simple, verifiable distributed systems  (SOCC19)  Replication Mergeable replicated data types  (OOPSLA19)  Exploiting Commutativity For Practical Fast Replication  (NSDI19)  Amazon Aurora: On Avoiding Distributed Consensus for I/Os, Commits, and Membership Changes  (SIGMOD18)  Dynamic atomic storage without consensus (JACM 2011)  PaxosStore:  High-availability Storage Made Practical in WeChat  (VLDB17) Transactions/consistency Interactive checks for coordin...