Google, "Megastore: Providing Scalable, Highly Available Storage for Interactive Services," CIDR, 2011. [PDF]
Yearly Archives: 2011
The Google File System
Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung, "The Google File System, " SOSP, (October, 2003). [PDF]
Summary
The Google File System or GFS is a scalable, fault-tolerance distributed file system custom-designed to handle Google's data-intensive workloads. GFS provides high aggregate throughput for a large number of readers and append-only writers (i.e., no overwrites) in a … Continue Reading ››Presented Orchestra at Yahoo! Research
Today I presented Orchestra at Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara. Ganesh hooked me up with Sriram Rao at Yahoo! Research, who kindly invited me to give a talk in front of their Cloud Platforms team. I received some very interesting feedback that will help us in further improving Orchestra design and extending its reach.
The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems
Mike Burrows, "The Chubby Lock Service for Loosely-Coupled Distributed Systems," OSDI, 2006. [PDF]
Summary
Chubby provides coarse-grained locking and reliable small-file storage for loosely-coupled distributed systems running in Google datacenters. The primary use case of Chubby is leader election in Google File System (GFS) and BigTable. However, over time, developers have used Chubby to implement … Continue Reading ››Brewer’s Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services
Seth Gilbert, Nancy Lynch, "Brewer’s Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services," ACM SIGACT News, Volume 33 Issue 2 (2002), pg. 51-59. [PDF]
Summary
In this PODC 2000 keynote speech, Eric Brewer claimed that it is impossible for a distributed system to provide the following three guarantees simultaneously:- Consistency,
- Availability, and
- Partition-tolerance.
Cluster-Based Scalable Network Services
Armando Fox, Steven D. Gribble, Yatin Chawathe, Eric A. Brewer, Paul Gauthier, "Cluster-Based Scalable Network Services," Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), (October, 1997). [PDF]
Summary
This paper identifies scalability (elasticity), availability, and cost effectiveness as the three fundamental requirements of cluster computing. It proposes a layered architecture that separates high-level policies from actual … Continue Reading ››The Datacenter Needs an Operating System
Matei Zaharia, Benjamin Hindman, Andy Konwinski, Ali Ghodsi, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica, "The Datacenter Needs an Operating System," USENIX HotCloud, (June, 2011). [PDF]
Summary
In recent years, many have pondered whether the datacenter is the new computer. This paper answers that question somewhat positively and goes one step forward … Continue Reading ››Hardware trends and future datacenter designs
John L. Hennessy, David A. Patterson, "Graphic Processing Units (GPUs)," Chapter 4, Computer Architecture, Fifth Edition: A Quantitative Approach, 2011. [LINK]
Mark D. Hill, Michael R. Marty, "Amdahl's Law in the Multicore Era," IEEE Computer, (July, 2008). [PDF]
H. Howie Huang, Shan Li, Alex Szalay, Andreas Terzis, "Performance Modeling and Analysis of … Continue Reading ››
Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing
RAD Lab, "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing," UC Berkeley Technical Report UCB/EECS 2009-28, 2009. [PDF]
Summary
The term 'Cloud Computing' has been in extensive use for last few years to suit many different, often unrelated, needs. This report tries to define what Cloud Computing might mean by identifying its characteristics … Continue Reading ››The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines
Luiz Andre Barroso and Urs Holzle, "The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines," Chapters 1-4 and 7, Morgan & Claypool Publishers. [PDF]