Strategy
When building a system on top of a set of wildly uncooperative and unruly computers you have knowledge problems: knowing when other nodes are dead; knowing when nodes become alive; getting information about other nodes so you can make local decisions, like knowing which node should handle a request based
Paper
One of the problems in building distributed systems is figuring out what the heck is going on. Usually endless streams of log files are consulted like ancients using entrails to divine the will of the Gods. To rise above these ancient practices we must rise another level of abstraction and
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And now for something completely different, brought to you by David Ackley and Daniel Cannon in their playfully thought provoking paper: Pursue robust indefinite scalability, wherein they try to take a fresh look at neural networks, starting from scratch. What is this strange thing called indefinite scalability? They sound like
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In It's Time for Low Latency Stephen Rumble et al. explore the idea that it's time to rearchitect our stack to live in the modern era of low-latency datacenter instead of high-latency WANs. The implications for program architectures will be revolutionary. Luiz André Barroso, Distinguished Engineer
Example
Update: as of the end of Q2 2011, Akamai had 95,811 servers deployed globally. Akamai is the CDN to the stars. It claims to deliver between 15 and 30 percent of all Web traffic, with major customers like Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and the US military. Traditionally quite secretive, we
Strategy
Dr. Daniel Abadi, author of the DBMS Musings blog and Cofounder of Hadapt, which offers a product improving Hadoop performance by 50x on relational data, is now taking his talents to graph data in Hadoop's tremendous inefficiency on graph data management (and how to avoid it), which shares
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As part of Dr. Indranil Gupta's CS 525 Spring 2011 Advanced Distributed Systems class, he has collected an incredible list of resources on distributed systems. His research group is also doing some interesting work. The various topics include: Before there Were Clouds, Cloud Computing, P2P Systems, Basic Distributed
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Mind the Gap: Reconnecting Architecture and OS Research is a paper presented at HotOS XIII, the place where researchers talk about making potential futures happen. For a great overview of the conference take a look at this article by Matt Welsh: Conference report: HotOS 2011 in Napa. In the VM/
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With BigData comes BigStorage costs. One way to store less is simply not to store the same data twice. That's the radically simple and powerful notion behind data deduplication. If you are one of those who got a good laugh out of the idea of eliminating SQL queries
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Christof Strauch, from Stuttgart Media University, has written an incredible 120+ page paper titled NoSQL Databases as an introduction and overview to NoSQL databases . The paper was written between 2010-06 and 2011-02, so it may be a bit out of date, but if you are looking to take in the
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Let's play a quick game of truth or sacrilage: are SQL and NoSQL are really just two sides of the same coin? That's what Erik Meijer and Gavin Bierman would have us believe in their "we can all get along and make a lot of
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Are long VM instance spin-up times in the cloud costing you money? That's the question that immediately came to mind when James Urquhart, in an interview at the Stata Conference, made this thought provoking comment: the faster you can get the resources into the hands of the people