Paper
Erasure codes are one of those seemingly magical mathematical creations that with the developments described in the paper XORing Elephants: Novel Erasure Codes for Big Data, are set to replace triple replication as the data storage protection mechanism of choice. The result says Robin Harris (StorageMojo) in an excellent article,
Paper
The paper MegaPipe: A New Programming Interface for Scalable Network I/O (video, slides) hits the common theme that if you want to go faster you need a better car design, not just a better driver. So that's why the authors started with a clean-slate and designed a
Paper
It's not often you get so enthusiastic a recommendation for a paper as Sergio Bossa gives Memory Barriers: a Hardware View for Software Hackers: If you only want to read one piece about CPUs architecture, cache coherency and memory barriers, make it this one. It is a clear
Paper
When you have a large population of servers you have both the opportunity and the incentive to perform interesting studies. Authors from Google and the University of California in Optimizing Google’s Warehouse Scale Computers: The NUMA Experience conducted such a study, taking a look at how jobs run on
Paper
Distributed transactions are costly because they use agreement protocols. Calvin says, surprisingly, that using a deterministic database allows you to avoid the use of agreement protocols. The approach is to use a deterministic transaction layer that does all the hard work before acquiring locks and the beginning of transaction execution.
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Looks like an interesting take on "a completely asynchronous, low-latency transaction management protocol, in line with the fully distributed NoSQL architecture." Warp: Multi-Key Transactions for Key-Value Stores overview: Implementing ACID transactions has been a longstanding challenge for NoSQL systems. Because these systems are based on a sharded architecture,
Paper
Joe Armstrong is a co-inventor of Erlang and general all around renaissance software tinkerer as shown by his excellent work on writing a C Compiler and his voluminous work on GitHub. Given the success of Erlang it's probably no surprise that he wrote his thesis on the ground
Paper
How do you layer a programmable Internet of smart things on top of the web? That's the question addressed by Dominique Guinard in his ambitious dissertation: A Web of Things Application Architecture - Integrating the Real-World (slides). With the continued siloing of content, perhaps we can keep our
Paper
In Algorithm Design for Performance Aware VM Consolidation we learn some shocking facts (gambling in Casablanca?): * Average server utilization in many data centers is low, estimated between 5% and 15%. This is wasteful because an idle server often consumes more than 50% of peak power. * Surely that's just
Paper
Georeplication is one of the standard techniques for dealing when bad things--failure and latency--happen to good systems. The problem is always: how do you do that? Murat Demirbas, Associate Professor at SUNY Buffalo, has a couple of really good posts that can help: MDCC: Multi-Data Center Consistency and Making Geo-Replicated
Strategy
If you like the idea of exploiting market inconsistencies to lower your costs then you will love this paper and video from the Hot Cloud '12 conference: Exploiting Hardware Heterogeneity within the Same Instance Type of Amazon EC2. The conclusion is interesting and is a source of good guidance:
Paper
RAMCube is a datacenter oriented design for RAM-based key-value store that supports thousands or tens of thousands of servers to offer up to hundreds of terabytes of RAM storage. Here's the PDF Paper describing the system and here's a video of the presentation given at HotCloud.