The Back-to-Basics Readings of 2012

• 887 words

After the AWS re: Invent conference I spent two weeks in Europe for the last customer visits of the year. I have since returned and am now in New York City enjoying a few days of winding down the last activities of the year before spending the holidays here with family. Do not expect too many blog posts or twitter updates. Although there are still a few very exciting AWS news updates to happen this year.

I thought this was a good moment to collect all the readings I suggested this year in one summary post. It was not until later in the year that I started to recording the readings here on the blog, so I hope this is indeed the complete list. I am pretty sure some if not all of these papers deserved to be elected to the hall of fame of best papers in distributed systems.

Feb 11 - A Survey of Rollback-Recovery Protocols in Message-Passing Systems, E. N. ( Mootaz) Elnozahy , Lorenzo Alvisi , Yi-min Wang , David B. Johnson, ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) Surveys Volume 34 Issue 3, September 2002

May 19 - Science of Winning Soccer: Emergent pattern-forming dynamics in association football, L. Vilar, D. Araújo, K. Davids, Y. Bar-Yam, Journal of Systems Science and Complexity

May 28 - Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems, Friedemann Mattern, Parallel and Distributed Algorithms, North-Holland (1989) , p. 215–226.

Jul 4 - Leases: An efficient fault-tolerant mechanism for distributed file cache consistency, Gray, Cary, and David Cheriton, Vol. 23. No. 5. ACM, 1989.

Jul 6 - End-To-End Arguments in System Design, by J. H. Saltzer, D. P. Reed, and D. D. Clark, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2(4):277-288, November 1984

Jul - 13 Hints for Computer Systems Design Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pp. 33-48, October 1983, Bretton Woods, NH, USA.

Jul 20 - Disco: Running Commodity Operating Systems on Scalable Multiprocessors by Edouard Bugnion, Scott Devine, Kinshuk Govil, Mendel Rosenblum in the Proceedings of the 16th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 5-8, 1997, St. Malo, France.

July 20 Xen and the art of virtualization by Paul Barham, Boris Dragovic, Keir Fraser, Steven Hand, Timothy L. Harris, Alex Ho, Rolf Neugebauer, Ian Pratt, Andrew Warfield, in the Proceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 19-22, 2003, Bolton Landing, NY USA.

Aug 11 - “On the Naming and Binding of Network Destinations”, Saltzer, J. H., RFC 1498, August 1993.

Aug 17 - SEDA: An Architecture for Well-Conditioned, Scalable Internet Services, Matt Welsh, David Culler, and Eric Brewer. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP-18), Banff, Canada, October, 2001.

Aug 24 - The 5 Minute Rule for Trading Memory for Disk Accesses and The 10 Byte Rule for Trading Memory for CPU Time, Jim Gray and Gianfranco Putzolu, Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Conference, pp. 395–398, 1987

Aug 24 - The Five-Minute Rule Ten Years Later, and Other Computer Storage Rules of Thumb, Jim Gray and Goetz Graefe, ACM SIGMOD Record 26 (4): 63–68, 1997

Aug 24 - The Five-Minute Rule 20 Years Later: and How Flash Memory Changes the Rules. Goetz Graefe, ACM Queue 6(4): 40-52 (2008)

Sep 7 - Adaptive load sharing in homogeneous distributed systems, D Eager, ED Lazowska and J Zahorjan - IEEE transactions on software engineering, 1986

Aug 31 - Granularity of Locks and Degrees of Consistency, J. Gray, R. Lorie, G.F. Putzolu, and I.L. Traiger, Modeling in Data Base Management Systems, G.M. Nijssen ed., North Holland Pub., 1976, pp. 364-394.

Sep 14 - "CryptDB: Protecting Confidentiality with Encrypted Query Processing", Raluca Ada Popa and Catherine Redfield and Nickolai Zeldovich and Hari Balakrishnan,Symposium on Operating Systems Principles Cascais, Portugal, October 2011

Sep 21 - Leases: An Efficient Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Distributed File Cache Consistency, Cary G. Gray and David R. Cheriton, Proceedings of the Twelfth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Priciples (SOSP), December 1989, Litchfield Park, AZ, USA.

Sep 28 - Why Bloom filters work the way they do, Michael Nielsen, Data driven Intelligence, September 26,2012

Sep 28 - Summary Cache: A Scalable Wide-Area Web Cache Sharing Protocol, Li Fan, Pei Cao, Jussara Almeida, Anrei Broder, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 8(3):281-293,2000.

Oct 12 - Automatic Reconfiguration in Autonet Thomas Rodeheffer and Michael Schroeder, Proceedings of the 13th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 13-16, 1991, Pacific Grove, CA USA.

Nov 2 - Weighted voting for replicated data, David K. Gifford, Proceedings of the 7th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, December 10-12, 1979, Pacific Grove, CA USA

Nov 9 - Using Encryption for Authentication in Large Networks of Computers, Roger M. Needham and Michael D. Schroeder, Communications of the ACM 21(12), December 1978, pp.993-998.

Nov 17 - Scale and performance in a distributed file system, John H. Howard, Michael L. Kazar, Sherri G. Menees, David A. Nichols, M. Satyanarayanan, Robert N. Sidebotham, and Michael J. West, ACM Trans. on Computer Systems 6(1), February 1988, pp. 51-81.

Nov 30 - Sparse Partition, Baruch Awerbuch and David Peleg, Proceedings of the 31st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), 503-513, October 1990.

I hope you enjoyed some of them. I certainly did. Next year there will be a new batch so catch up on what you haven’t read during the holidays :-).