Comments for Building Scalable Systems

Comment on Reading List for Distributed Systems by ssrihari18

ssrihari18 — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:28:44 +0000

Hi Swami!
I maintain a blog called Systems We Make (http://www.systemswemake.com/) where I try to curate research in distributed systems. Of late I’ve begun summarizing the papers in an effort to get a more intimate understanding of DS.

Comment on Synchronous vs. Asynchronous replication strategy: Which one is better? by Parik

Parik — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:21:53 +0000

Good writeup. I personally also like to differentiate between semi-synchronous replication and purely asynchronous replication. With semi-synchronous replication since the remote replica has received the write, but not applied it, it provides better performance than purely synchronous systems. At the same time it provides slightly better availability and durability guarantees then purely asynchronous systems.

Comment on Reading List for Distributed Systems by Parik

Parik — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:11:25 +0000

Good list.

Comment on Reading List for Distributed Systems by swaminathans

swaminathans — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:53:36 +0000

Agree with your comments on building a definitive list. This is by no means a complete list. However, as you point, I think I missed major body of work on failure detectors and gossip protocol. This is just an oversight and the one you’re pointing out is one of those seminal works. Will update them soon.

Thanks Dan!

Comment on Reading List for Distributed Systems by dancres

dancres — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 09:27:20 +0000

I was wondering if there was any specific reason you didn’t include something on failure detectors? Maybe – Chandra and Toueg, “Unreliable failure detectors and reliable distributed systems”

I don’t believe there can ever be a single definitive list and arguing over the contents is thus a waste of time. Understanding what someone else values or doesn’t seems more likely to lead to insight hence my question above.

Thank you,

Dan.

Comment on Reading List for Distributed Systems by Quora

Quora — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 06:26:38 +0000

What are the seminal papers in distributed systems? Why?…

Note: this is slightly biased to the problems of scalable online processing systems (mostly data storage and messaging). As such I may be leaving out papers related to other (equally important) topics such as HPC, security in distributed systems and ma…

Comment on Reading List for Distributed Systems by sridharvisu76

sridharvisu76 — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 18:43:11 +0000

Excellent list. Thanks a lot Swami

Comment on Reading List for Distributed Systems by links for 2011-09-07 « Dan Creswell’s Linkblog

links for 2011-09-07 « Dan Creswell’s Linkblog — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 12:02:58 +0000

[...] Reading List for Distributed Systems « Building Scalable Systems I quite often get asked by friends, colleagues who are interested in learning about distributed systems saying “Please tell me what are the top papers and books we need to read to learn more about distributed systems”. I used to write one off emails giving a few pointers. Now that, I’ve asked enough I thought it is a worthwhile exercise to put these together in a single post. (tags: distributed architecture design) [...]

Comment on Filtering effects in cache hierarchies by swaminathans

swaminathans — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 04:01:19 +0000

Hey Gokul,

Love it, will read your paper right away .

Comment on Filtering effects in cache hierarchies by Gokul Soundar

Gokul Soundar — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 03:15:33 +0000

Very interesting post. I’m surprised that I didn’t know of this work sooner! I looked at a similar problem in the context of database buffer pool and storage servers and tried to derive the secondary hit ratios (at the downstream cache) by monitoring the behavior at the first level. In general, it turns out to be very difficult for arbitrary replacement policies but some approximations can be made for LRU-like policies.

(Shamless plug)
More details in VLDB paper:
Dynamic Partitioning of the Cache Hierarchy in Shared Data Centers. VLDB’08

Gokul