Many, if not all, practical distributed systems rely on partial synchrony in one way or another, be it a failure detection, a lease mechanism, or some optimization that takes advantage of synchrony to avoid doing a bunch of extra work. These partial synchrony approaches need to know some crucial parameters about their world to estimate how much synchrony to expect. A misjudgment of such synchrony guarantees may have significant negative consequences. While most practical systems plan for peri...| Aleksey Charapko
Here is a list for the Fall 2025 semester. Please join the reading group here: https://discord.gg/VS7J4PAU58. We meet on Thursdays. The schedule is also available on our calendar. | Aleksey Charapko
The last paper we covered in the Distributed Systems Reading group discussed CPUs, data centers, scheduling, and carbon emissions—we read “The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling.” Below is my improvised presentation of this paper for the reading group. | Aleksey Charapko
Last week, we read “Databases in the Era of Memory-Centric Computing” CIDR’25 paper in our reading group. This paper argues that the rising cost of main memory and lagging improvement in memory bandwidth do not bode well for traditional computing architectures centered around computing devices (i.e., CPUs). As CPUs get more cores, the memory bandwidth […]| Aleksey Charapko
Last week we read “OLTP Through the Looking Glass 16 Years Later: Communication is the New Bottleneck” CIDR’25 paper by Xinjing Zhou, Viktor Leis, Xiangyao Yu, Michael Stonebraker. This paper revisits the original “OLTP Through the Looking Glass, and What We Found There” paper and examines the bottlenecks in modern OLTP databases.| Aleksey Charapko
We have been doing a Zoom distributed systems paper reading group for 5 years and have covered around 190 papers. This semester, we should reach the milestone of 200 papers. Over the years, my commitment to the group has varied — at some point, I was writing paper reviews, and more recently, I’ve had less […]| Aleksey Charapko
Last time, I briefly talked about my pile of eternal rejections. Today, I will describe another paper that has been sitting in that pile for quite some time. It seems like this particular work, done by my student Bocheng Cui, has found its home, though, and by the skin of its teeth, it will appear in SRDS’24.| Aleksey Charapko
I have a “pile” of papers that continuously get rejected from any conference. All these papers, according to the reviews, “lack novelty,” and therefore are deemed “not interesting” by the reviewing experts. There are some things in common in these papers — they are either observational or rely on old and proven techniques to solve a problem or improve a system/algorithm. Jokingly, I call this set of papers the “pile of eternal rejections.” Recently, the pile...| Aleksey Charapko
For the 153rd reading group paper, we read something very different this time: “Deep Note: Can Acoustic Interference Damage the Availability of Hard Disk Storage in Underwater Data Centers?” This HotStorage short paper explores the possibility of using soundwaves to attack underwater data centers. In particular, the paper shows how magnetic disks can be disrupted by sound, causing them to degrade or even outright stop working, leading to failures of whatever systems were relying on these ...| Aleksey Charapko
The 152nd reading group meeting continued the microservices discussion started in the 151st paper. We read the “Blueprint: A Toolchain for Highly-Reconfigurable Microservice Applications” SOSP’23 paper by Vaastav Anand, Deepak Garg, Antoine Kaufmann, and Jonathan Mace. The premise of the Blueprint is the separation of the app’s logic and most of the infrastructure/ops concerns. | Aleksey Charapko
We kicked off the winter term set of papers in the reading group with the “Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications” HotOS’23 paper. The paper proposes a different approach to designing distributed applications by replacing the microservice architecture style with something more fluid.| Aleksey Charapko
