Computing Platforms

Content

The seminar will cover core concepts and ideas in the general area of computer systems, ranging from software and hardware architectures to system design for operating systems, data processing systems, and distributed systems. The focus will be on fundamental ideas that apply across systems and application areas but with an emphasis on those ideas that apply to cloud platforms and hardware accelerators.

Format

The seminar will consist on student presentations based on a list of papers that will be provided at the beginning of the course. Presentations will be done in teams. Presentations will be arranged in slots of 30 minutes talk plus 15 minutes questions. Grades will be assigned based on quality of the presentation, coverage of the topic including material not in the original papers, participation during the seminar, and ability to understand, present, and criticize the underlying technology.

Seminar Hours

Mondays, 4-6pm, in protected page Zoom (use your "" account).

Lecturers

Prof. Gustavo Alonso
Dr. Michael Giardino
Dr. Ingo Müller
Prof. Ce Zhang

Schedule

Papers

You may need to click on the links from within the ETH network (via VPN) to get the full-text papers.

Database Systems

Neumann, T. (2011). Efficiently Compiling Efficient Query Plans for Modern Hardware. In: PVLDB. [external page link]
Diaconu, C., Freedman, C., Ismert, E., et al. (2013). Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine. In: SIGMOD. [external page link]
Arulraj, J., Pavlo, A. (2017). How to Build a Non-Volatile Memory Database Management System. In: SIGMOD. [external page link]
Ma, L., Van Aken, D., Hefny, A., Mezerhane, G., Pavlo, A., Gordon, G. J. (2018). Query-based Workload Forecasting for Self-Driving Database Management Systems. In: SIGMOD. [external page link]

System Design

CAP Theorem:
Brewer, E. (2012). CAP Twelve Years Later: How the “Rules” Have Changed. In: Computer, 45(2). [external page link]
Abadi, D. (2012). Consistency Tradeoffs in Modern Distributed Database System Design: CAP is Only Part of the Story. In: Computer, 45(2). [external page link]
Attack of the Killer Microseconds:
Barroso, L., Marty, M., Patterson, D., & Ranganathan, P. (2017). Attack of the killer microseconds. In: CACM, 60(4). [external page link]
Primorac, M., Bugnion, E., & Argyraki, K. (2017). How to measure the killer microsecond. In: CCR, 47(5). [external page link]
Delimitrou, C., & Kozyrakis, C. (2018). Amdahl’s law for tail latency: Queueing theoretic models can guide design trade-offs in systems targeting tail latency, not just average performance. In: CACM, 61(8). [external page link]
Klimovic, A., Kozyrakis, C., Thereska, E., John, B., & Kumar, S. (2016). Flash storage disaggregation. In: EuroSys. [external page link]
Marty, M., de Kruijf, M., Adriaens, J., et al. (2019). Snap: a microkernel approach to host networking. In: SOSP 2019. [external page link]
Dalton, M., Schultz, D., Adriaens, J., et al. (2018). Andromeda: Performance, Isolation, and Velocity at Scale in Cloud Network Virtualization. In: NSDI. [external page link]

Data Processing in the Cloud

Firestone, D., Putnam, A., Mundkur, et al. (2018). Azure Accelerated Networking: SmartNICs in the Public Cloud Azure Accelerated Networking: SmartNICs in the Public Cloud. In: NSDI. [external page link]
Corbett, J. C., Dean, J., Epstein, M., et al. (2012). Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database. In: OSDI. [external page link]
Bacon, D. F., Bales, N., Bruno, N., et al. (2017). Spanner: Becoming a SQL system. In: SIGMOD. [external page link]
Lakshman, A., & Malik, P. (2010). Cassandra: a decentralized structured storage system. In: SIGOPS Review, 44(2). [external page link1] [external page link2]
Dageville, B., Huang, J., Lee, A. W., et al. (2016). The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse. In: SIGMOD. [external page link]
Ousterhout, K., Rasti, R., Ratnasamy, S., Shenker, S., & Chun, B.-G. (2015). Making Sense of Performance in Data Analytics Frameworks. In: NSDI. [external page link]
Burrows, M. (2006). The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems. In: OSDI. [external page link]
DeCandia, G., Hastorun, D., Jampani, M., Kakulapati, et al. (2007). Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store. In: SIGOPS. [external page link]
Shafer, J., Rixner, S., & Cox, A. L. (2010). The Hadoop distributed filesystem: Balancing portability and performance. In: ISPASS. [external page link1] [external page link2]
Armbrust, M., Ghodsi, A., Zaharia, M., et al. (2015). Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark. In: SIGMOD. [lexternal page ink]
Hunt, P., Konar, M., Junqueira, F. P., & Reed, B. (2019). ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for internet-scale systems. In: USENIX ATC. [external page link]
Realtime Data Processing at Facebook (2016) https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2882903.2904441?download=true
Hellerstein, J. M., Faleiro, J., Gonzalez, et al. (2019). Serverless Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. In: CIDR. [external page link]
Shankar, V., Krauth, K., Vodrahalli, K., Pu, Q., et al. (2020). Serverless linear algebra. In: SoCC. [external page link]
Klimovic, A., Wang, Y., Stuedi, P., et al. (2018). Pocket: Elastic Ephemeral Storage for Serverless Analytics. In: OSDI.
[external page link]
Müller, I., Marroquín, R., & Alonso, G. (2020). Lambada: Interactive Data Analytics on Cold Data Using Serverless Cloud Infrastructure. In: SIGMOD. [external page link]