papers

A collection of academic papers, articles, and other resources that I plan to read or have read. The content has a focus on distributed systems.

I have also included my notes on select resources to summarize important takeaways and to help me better understand the material.

Blog Posts and Online Articles

• Consistency Models
• Jepsen Analyses
• Strong Consistency Models
• Readings in Distributed Systems
• The Log: What every software engineering should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction

Consensus

• Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems

  Chandra, Tushar Deepak, and Sam Toueg. 1996. “Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems.” Journal of the ACM (JACM) 43 (2). ACM: 225–67.

• Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process

  Fischer, Michael J, Nancy A Lynch, and Michael S Paterson. 1982. “Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process.” MASSACHUSETTS INST OF TECH CAMBRIDGE LAB FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE.

• Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems

  Oki, Brian M, and Barbara H Liskov. 1988. “Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems.” In Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Acm Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 8–17. ACM.

• Viewstamped Replication Revisited

  Liskov, Barbara, and James Cowling. 2012. “Viewstamped Replication Revisited.”

• The Part Time Parliament

  Lamport, Leslie, and others. 1998. “The Part-Time Parliament.” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 16 (2): 133–69.

• Paxos Made Simple

  Lamport, Leslie, and others. 2001. “Paxos Made Simple.” ACM Sigact News 32 (4): 18–25.

• Paxos Made Live - An Engineering Perspective

  Chandra, Tushar D, Robert Griesemer, and Joshua Redstone. 2007. “Paxos Made Live: An Engineering Perspective.” In Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Acm Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, 398–407. ACM.

• Flexible Paxos: Quorum Intersection Revisited

  Howard, Heidi, Dahlia Malkhi, and Alexander Spiegelman. 2016. “Flexible Paxos: Quorum Intersection Revisited.” arXiv Preprint arXiv:1608.06696.

• Zab: High-Performance Broadcast for Primary-Backup Systems

  Junqueira, Flavio P, Benjamin C Reed, and Marco Serafini. 2011. “Zab: High-Performance Broadcast for Primary-Backup Systems.” In 2011 Ieee/Ifip 41st International Conference on Dependable Systems & Networks (Dsn), 245–56. IEEE.

• ZooKeeper's Atomic Broadcast Protocol: Theory and Practice

  Medeiros, André. 2012. “ZooKeeper’s Atomic Broadcast Protocol: Theory and Practice.” Aalto University School of Science 20.

• Vive la Différence: Paxos vs. Viewstamped Replication vs. Zab

  Van Renesse, Robbert, Nicolas Schiper, and Fred B Schneider. 2015. “Vive La Différence: Paxos Vs. Viewstamped Replication Vs. Zab.” IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 12 (4). IEEE: 472–84.

• In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm

  Ongaro, Diego, and John Ousterhout. 2014. “In Search of an Understandable Consensus Algorithm.” In 2014 {Usenix} Annual Technical Conference ({Usenix}{ATC} 14), 305–19.

• Consensus: Bridging Theory and Practice

  Ongaro, Diego. 2014. “Consensus: Bridging Theory and Practice.” PhD thesis, Stanford University.

• Raft Refloated: Do We Have Consensus?

  Howard, Heidi, Malte Schwarzkopf, Anil Madhavapeddy, and Jon Crowcroft. 2015. “Raft Refloated: Do We Have Consensus?” Operating Systems Review 49 (1): 12–21.

Causality

• Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System

  Lamport, Leslie. 1978. “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System.” Communications of the ACM 21 (7). ACM: 558–65.

• Timestamps in Message-Passing Systems That Preserve the Partial Ordering

  Fidge, Colin J. 1987. Timestamps in Message-Passing Systems That Preserve the Partial Ordering. Australian National University. Department of Computer Science.

• Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems

  Mattern, Friedemann, and others. 1988. Virtual Time and Global States of Distributed Systems. Citeseer.

• Logical Physical Clocks and Consistent Snapshots in Globally Distributed Databases

  Demirbas, Murat, Marcelo Leone, Bharadwaj Avva, Deepak Madeppa, and Sandeep Kulkarni. 2014. “Logical Physical Clocks and Consistent Snapshots in Globally Distributed Databases.”

• The Bloom Clock

  Ramabaja, Lum. 2019. “The Bloom Clock.” CoRR abs/1905.13064. http://arxiv.org/abs/1905.13064.

Consistency

• Brewer's Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services

  Gilbert, Seth, and Nancy Lynch. 2002. “Brewer’s Conjecture and the Feasibility of Consistent, Available, Partition-Tolerant Web Services.” Acm Sigact News 33 (2). ACM: 51–59.

Data Structures

• Fast set operations using treaps

  Blelloch, Guy E, and Margaret Reid-Miller. 1998. “Fast Set Operations Using Treaps.” In SPAA, 98:16–26.

• A Skip List Cookbook

  Pugh, William. 1998. “A Skip List Cookbook.”

• Skip Lists: A Probabilistic Alternative to Balanced Trees

  Pugh, William. 1990. “Skip Lists: A Probabilistic Alternative to Balanced Trees.” Communications of the ACM 33 (6).

• Less hashing, same performance: Building a better Bloom filter

  Kirsch, Adam, and Michael Mitzenmacher. 2006. “Less Hashing, Same Performance: Building a Better Bloom Filter.” In European Symposium on Algorithms, 456–67. Springer.

• Advanced bloom filter based algorithms for efficient approximate data de-duplication in streams

  Bera, Suman K, Sourav Dutta, Ankur Narang, and Souvik Bhattacherjee. 2012. “Advanced Bloom Filter Based Algorithms for Efficient Approximate Data de-Duplication in Streams.” arXiv Preprint arXiv:1212.3964.

• Cuckoo filter: Practically better than bloom

  Fan, Bin, Dave G Andersen, Michael Kaminsky, and Michael D Mitzenmacher. 2014. “Cuckoo Filter: Practically Better Than Bloom.” In Proceedings of the 10th Acm International on Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies, 75–88. ACM.

• Don't thrash: how to cache your hash on flash

  Bender, Michael A, Martin Farach-Colton, Rob Johnson, Russell Kraner, Bradley C Kuszmaul, Dzejla Medjedovic, Pablo Montes, Pradeep Shetty, Richard P Spillane, and Erez Zadok. 2012. “Don’t Thrash: How to Cache Your Hash on Flash.” Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment 5 (11). VLDB Endowment: 1627–37.

• An improved data stream summary: the count-min sketch and its applications

  Cormode, Graham, and Shan Muthukrishnan. 2005. “An Improved Data Stream Summary: The Count-Min Sketch and Its Applications.” Journal of Algorithms 55 (1). Elsevier: 58–75.

• A general-purpose counting filter: Making every bit count

  Pandey, Prashant, Michael A Bender, Rob Johnson, and Rob Patro. 2017. “A General-Purpose Counting Filter: Making Every Bit Count.” In Proceedings of the 2017 Acm International Conference on Management of Data, 775–87. ACM.

• HyperLogLog: the analysis of a near-optimal cardinality estimation algorithm

  Flajolet, Philippe, Éric Fusy, Olivier Gandouet, and Frédéric Meunier. 2007. “Hyperloglog: The Analysis of a Near-Optimal Cardinality Estimation Algorithm.” In Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, 137–56. Discrete Mathematics; Theoretical Computer Science.

• HyperLogLog in practice: algorithmic engineering of a state of the art cardinality estimation algorithm

  Heule, Stefan, Marc Nunkesser, and Alexander Hall. 2013. “HyperLogLog in Practice: Algorithmic Engineering of a State of the Art Cardinality Estimation Algorithm.” In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, 683–92. ACM.

• LSM Tree

  O’Neil, Patrick, Edward Cheng, Dieter Gawlick, and Elizabeth O’Neil. 1996. “The Log-Structured Merge-Tree (Lsm-Tree).” Acta Informatica 33 (4). Springer: 351–85.

• bLSM: A General Purpose LSM Tree

  Sears, Russell, and Raghu Ramakrishnan. 2012. “BLSM: A General Purpose Log Structured Merge Tree.” In Proceedings of the 2012 Acm Sigmod International Conference on Management of Data, 217–28. ACM.

• A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types

  Shapiro, Marc, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero, and Marek Zawirski. 2011. “A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types.” PhD thesis, Inria–Centre Paris-Rocquencourt; INRIA.

• Efficient Synchronization of State-based CRDTs

  Enes, Vitor, Paulo Sérgio Almeida, Carlos Baquero, and João Leitão. 2018. “Efficient Synchronization of State-Based Crdts.” arXiv Preprint arXiv:1803.02750.

P2P

• Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications

  Stoica, Ion, Robert Morris, David Liben-Nowell, David R Karger, M Frans Kaashoek, Frank Dabek, and Hari Balakrishnan. 2003. “Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-Peer Lookup Protocol for Internet Applications.” IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) 11 (1). IEEE Press: 17–32.

• Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric

  Maymounkov, Petar, and David Mazieres. 2002. “Kademlia: A Peer-to-Peer Information System Based on the Xor Metric.” In International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems, 53–65. Springer.

Systems

• Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store

  DeCandia, Giuseppe, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall, and Werner Vogels. 2007. “Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-Value Store.” In ACM Sigops Operating Systems Review, 41:205–20. 6. ACM.

• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

  Chang, Fay, Jeffrey Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Wilson C Hsieh, Deborah A Wallach, Mike Burrows, Tushar Chandra, Andrew Fikes, and Robert E Gruber. 2008. “Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data.” ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 26 (2). ACM: 4.

• Cassandra - A Decentralized Structured Storage System

  Lakshman, Avinash, and Prashant Malik. 2010. “Cassandra: A Decentralized Structured Storage System.” ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 44 (2). ACM: 35–40.

• Kafka: A Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing

  Kreps, Jay, Neha Narkhede, Jun Rao, and others. 2011. “Kafka: A Distributed Messaging System for Log Processing.” In Proceedings of the Netdb, 1–7.

• Readings in Database Systems
• Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database

  Corbett, James C., Jeffrey Dean, Michael Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, JJ Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat, et al. 2012. “Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database.” In OSDI.

• Spanner: Becoming a SQL System

  Bacon, David F., Nathan Bales, Nico Bruno, Brian F. Cooper, Adam Dickinson, Andrew Fikes, Campbell Fraser, et al. 2017. “Spanner: Becoming a Sql System.” In Proc. SIGMOD 2017, 331–43.

Testing

• An Analysis of Network-Partitioning Failures in Cloud Systems

  Alquraan, Ahmed, Hatem Takruri, Mohammed Alfatafta, and Samer Al-Kiswany. 2018. “An Analysis of Network-Partitioning Failures in Cloud Systems.” In 13th Usenix Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation Osdi 18), 51–68.

• Why Is Random Testing Effective for Partition Tolerance Bugs?

  Majumdar, Rupak, and Filip Niksic. 2017. “Why Is Random Testing Effective for Partition Tolerance Bugs?” Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages 2 (POPL). ACM: 46.