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 of student presentations based on a list of papers that will be provided at the beginning of the course. Presentations will be arranged in slots of 20 minutes talk plus 10 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, at CHN D 44. The first seminar will be on February 17th.
Lecturers
- Prof. Gustavo Alonso
- Dr. Jonas Dann
- Dr. Shien Zhu
Schedule
Papers
You may need to click on the links from within the ETH network (via VPN) to get the full-text papers.
1. M. Armbrust, et al. (2010) A View of Cloud Computing. In CACM. [external page Link]
2. L. Barroso, M. Marty, D. Patterson, P. Ranganathan (2017). Attack of the killer microseconds. In CACM. [external page Link]
3. M. Primorac, E. Bugnion, K. Argyraki (2017). How to measure the killer microsecond. In CCR. [external page Link]
4. C. Delimitrou, C. Kozyrakis (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. [external page Link]
5. H. Li, et al. (2023) Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems for Cloud Platforms. In ASPLOS. [external page Link]
6. H. Al Maruf, et al. (2023) TPP: Transparent Page Placement for CXL-Enabled Tiered-Memory. In ASPLOS. [external page Link]
7. Z. Guo, Y. Shan, X. Luo, Y. Huang, Y. Zhang (2022). Clio: A Hardware-Software Co-Designed Disaggregated Memory System. In ASPLOS. [external page Link]
8. Q. Zhang, P. Bernstein, D. Berger, B. Chandramouli (2022). Redy: Remote Dynamic Memory Cache. In VLDB. [external page Link]
9. H. Mohr-Daurat, X. Sun, H. Pirk (2023). BOSS - An Architecture for Database Kernel Composition. In PVLDB. [external page Link]
10. Y. Tian, et al. (2025). Towards Query Optimizer as a Service (QOaaS) in a Unified LakeHouse Platform: Can One QO Rule Them All? In CIDR. [external page Link]
11. X. Yang, et al. (2024). PolarDB-MP: A Multi-Primary Cloud-Native Database via Disaggregated Shared Memory. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
12. G. DeCandia, D. Hastorun, M. Jampani, G. Kakulapati, et al. (2007). Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store. In SIGOPS. [external page Link]
13. Corbett, J. C., Dean, J., Epstein, M., et al. (2012). Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database. In OSDI. [external page Link]
14. Bacon, D. F., Bales, N., Bruno, N., et al. (2017). Spanner: Becoming a SQL system. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
15. Armbrust, M., Ghodsi, A., Zaharia, M., et al. (2015). Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
16. Chen, G. J., Wiener, J. L., Iyer, S., Jaiswa, et al. (2016). Realtime Data Processing at Facebook. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
17. Verbitski et al (2017) Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
18. J. Wang, et al. (2023) PolarDB-IMCI: A Cloud-Native HTAP Database System at Alibaba. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
19. L. Thostrup, G. Doci, N. Boeschen, M. Luthra, C. Binnig (2023). Distributed GPU Joins on Fast RDMA-capable Networks. In SIGMOD. [external page Link]
20. Fang, Yuanwei and Zou, Chen and Chien, Andrew A (2019). Accelerating raw data analysis with the ACCORDA software and hardware architecture. In VLDB. [external page Link]
21. H. Saokar, S. Demetriou, N. Magerko, M. Kontorovich, J. Kirstein, and M. Leibold, D. Skarlatos, H. Khandelwal and C. Tang (2023). ServiceRouter: Hyperscale and Minimal Cost Service Mesh at Meta. In OSDI. [external page Link]
22. J. Schleier-Smith, V. Sreekanti, A. Khandelwal, J. Carreira, N. J. Yadwadkar, R. Ada Popa, J. E. Gonzalez, I. Stoica, D. A. Patterson (2021). What Serverless Computing Is and Should Become: The Next Phase of Cloud Computing. In CACM. [external page Link]
23. M. Saxena, et al. (2023). The Story of AWS Glue. In VLDB. [external page Link]
24. Shankar, V., Krauth, K., Vodrahalli, K., Pu, Q., et al. (2020). Serverless linear algebra. In SoCC. [external page Link]
25. Klimovic, A., Wang, Y., Stuedi, P., et al. (2018). Pocket: Elastic Ephemeral Storage for Serverless Analytics. In OSDI. [external page Link]
26. S. Fouladi, F. Romero, et al. (2019). From Laptop to Lambda: Outsourcing Everyday Jobs to Thousands of Transient Functional Containers. In ATC. [external page Link]
27. A. Wang, J. Zhang, X. Ma, A. Anwar, L. Rupprecht, D. Skourtis, V. Tarasov, F. Yan, Y. Cheng (2020). INFINICACHE: exploiting ephemeral serverless functions to build a cost-effective memory cache. In FAST. [external page Link]
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