Theano Stavrinos will present her general exam on May 22, 2019 at 10am in CS 402. The members of her committee are: Wyatt Lloyd (adviser), Amit Levy, and Jennifer Rexford Everyone is invited to attend her talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. Her abstract and reading list follow below. Abstract: Centralized sequencers are an increasingly common tool for ordering events in a distributed system due to their simplicity and high performance relative to distributed ordering protocols. However, as centralized, on-path components, sequencers present challenges to designers of high-performance systems. First, the throughput of the entire system is limited by the performance of the sequencer. Second, packet loss and component failures may lead to holes (gaps) in the sequence; holes are difficult to deal with at the system level without affecting performance. This generals exam describes the CATS project, which designs and implements a sequencing subsystem that addresses these issues. The main components of CATS are a sequencer recovery protocol; a proxy layer which requests sequence numbers and executes operations on behalf of clients; and a reliable transport protocol, TCATS, tailored to the CATS subsystem. These components work together to provide sequencing with unbounded throughput, meanwhile presenting to clients the simple abstraction of a holeless sequence. This exam will also present an evaluation of TCATS, the custom transport protocol, alongside other reliable transport protocols to determine whether TCATS is necessary for the good performance of the sequencing subsystem. -------------- Textbook: “Distributed Systems” by Tanenbaum and van Steen Datacenter networking/RPC-related papers 1. Kalia, Anuj, Michael Kaminsky, and David G. Andersen. “ Datacenter RPCs can be General and Fast. ” In Proc. USENIX NSDI. 2019. (eRPC) 2. Jeong, EunYoung, Shinae Wood, Muhammad Jamshed, Haewon Jeong, Sunghwan Ihm, Dongsu Han, and KyoungSoo Park. " mTCP: a Highly Scalable User-level TCP Stack for Multicore Systems. " In 11th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 14), pp. 489-502. 2014. 3. Birrell, Andrew D., and Bruce Jay Nelson. " Implementing remote procedure calls. " ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 2, no. 1 (1984): 39-59. 4. Montazeri, Behnam, Yilong Li, Mohammad Alizadeh, and John Ousterhout. " Homa: A receiver-driven low-latency transport protocol using network priorities. " In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, pp. 221-235. ACM, 2018. Papers related to ordering of events in distributed systems 1. Lamport, Leslie. " Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system. " Communications of the ACM 21, no. 7 (1978): 558-565. 2. Lamport, Leslie. " The part-time parliament. " ACM Transactions on Computer systems 16, no. 2 (1998): 133-169. 3. Herlihy, Maurice P., and Jeannette M. Wing. " Linearizability: A correctness condition for concurrent objects. " ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS) 12, no. 3 (1990): 463-492. 4. Corbett, James C., Jeffrey Dean, Michael Epstein, Andrew Fikes, Christopher Frost, Jeffrey John Furman, Sanjay Ghemawat et al. " Spanner: Google’s globally distributed database. " ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 31, no. 3 (2013): 8. 5. Wang, Cheng, Jianyu Jiang, Xusheng Chen, Ning Yi, and Heming Cui. " APUS: Fast and scalable Paxos on RDMA. " In Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on Cloud Computing, pp. 94-107. ACM, 2017. Sequencer-related papers 1. Balakrishnan, Mahesh, Dahlia Malkhi, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Ted Wobbler, Michael Wei, and John D. Davis. " CORFU: A Shared Log Design for Flash Clusters. " In NSDI 12, pp. 1-14. 2012. 2. Li, Jialin, Ellis Michael, Naveen Kr Sharma, Adriana Szekeres, and Dan RK Ports. " Just Say NO to Paxos Overhead: Replacing Consensus with Network Ordering. " In 12th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 16), pp. 467-483. 2016. BQ_BEGIN BQ_END