Here are my notes from the 2025 TLA+ Community Event. See also my colleague Murat Demirbas’s notes (he was one of the event’s organizers). The talks were all recorded, and the videos, slides, and abstracts are posted. Some years there are TLA+ “conferences” co-located with industry conferences, and some years there are “community events” co-located with academic conferences. This year was a community event, the first TLA+ community event in North America. There were about 20 parti...| A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
In 2022, Marc Brooker argued that formal methods like TLA+ can check distributed systems' correctness but not their performance. Since then, I’ve been searching for good performance modeling tools. Queue theory seems like a foundation for performance modeling, so I learned some queue theory, although I read the wrong book. That book tried to teach me to analyze queue networks by solving intricate equations, but for most queue networks the equations can’t be solved, and for the rest I can...| A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
Performance Modeling and Design of Computer Systems: Queueing Theory in Action, by Dr. Mor Harchol-Balter. We are A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, Andrew Helwer, and Murat Demirbas, three enthusiasts of distributed systems and formal methods. We’re looking for rigorous ways to model the performance of distributed systems, and we hoped this book would point the way. We followed the author’s undergrad syllabus, although we were disappointed at its focus on single-threaded task queues. Most of our work...| A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
I attended my first High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS) conference last week. Here are my notes on the talks. Please don’t quote or trust me; these notes are based on what I heard, frantically typed, and minimally polished later. I have certainly misunderstood a lot, especially in areas outside my expertise. And even if I heard them correctly, treat researchers' claims skeptically! Table Of Contents Intro Keynote: HPTS Comes Full Circle - James Hamilton (Amazon) High performance tra...| A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
PRISM is a probabilistic specification language. Not only can it tell you whether something in your system is possible, it can also tell you how likely. For example, given| Hillel Wayne
Simple Simulations for System Builders| brooker.co.za
Formal Methods Only Solve Half My Problems| brooker.co.za
