Cross-domain applications are rapidly adopting blockchain techniques for immutability, availability, integrity, and interoperability. However, for most applications, global consensus is unnecessary and may not even provide sufficient guarantees.

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To process real-world datasets, modern data-parallel systems often require extremely large amounts of memory, which are both costly and energy inefficient. Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies offer high capacity compared to DRAM and low energy ...

Optimizing scheduling and communication of distributed data processing for resource and data characteristics is crucial for achieving high performance. Existing approaches to such optimizations largely fall into two categories. First, distributed runtimes ...

A large class of IoT applications read sensors, execute application logic, and actuate actuators. However, the lack of high-level programming abstractions compromises correctness, especially in the presence of failures and unwanted interleaving between ...

Log-Structured Merge Key-Value stores (LSM KVs) are designed to offer good write performance, by capturing client writes in memory, and only later flushing them to storage. Writes are later compacted into a tree-like data structure on disk to improve ...

In-memory caching of intermediate data and active combining of data in shuffle buffers have been shown to be very effective in minimizing the recomputation and I/O cost in big data processing systems such as Spark and Flink. However, it has also been ...

Application programmers increasingly prefer distributed storage systems with strong consistency and distributed transactions (e.g., Google’s Spanner) for their strong guarantees and ease of use. Unfortunately, existing transactional storage systems are ...

Resource Managers like YARN and Mesos have emerged as a critical layer in the cloud computing system stack, but the developer abstractions for leasing cluster resources and instantiating application logic are very low level. This flexibility comes at a ...

DrTM is a fast in-memory transaction processing system that exploits advanced hardware features such as remote direct memory access (RDMA) and hardware transactional memory (HTM). To achieve high efficiency, it mostly offloads concurrency control such ...

Distributed in-memory key-value stores (KVSs), such as memcached, have become a critical data serving layer in modern Internet-oriented data center infrastructure. Their performance and efficiency directly affect the QoS of web services and the ...

Spanner is Google’s scalable, multiversion, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This article describes how ...

Distributed mobile transactions utilize commit protocols to achieve atomicity and consistent decisions. This is challenging, as mobile environments are typically characterized by frequent perturbations such as network disconnections and node failures. ...

Data center power consumption is growing to unprecedented levels: the EPA estimates U.S. data centers will consume 100 billion kilowatt hours annually by 2011. Much of this energy is wasted in idle systems: in typical deployments, server utilization is ...

Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google ...

With the advent of chip multiprocessors, exploiting intratransaction parallelism in database systems is an attractive way of improving transaction performance. However, exploiting intratransaction parallelism is difficult for two reasons: first, ...

Asbestos, a new operating system, provides novel labeling and isolation mechanisms that help contain the effects of exploitable software flaws. Applications can express a wide range of policies with Asbestos's kernel-enforced labels, including controls ...

As raw system performance continues to improve at exponential rates, the utility of many services is increasingly limited by availability rather than performance. A key approach to improving availability involves replicating the service across multiple, ...

The widespread use of clusters and Web farms has increased the importance of data replication. In this article, we show how to implement consistent and scalable data replication at the middleware level. We do this by combining transactional concurrency ...

Cashmere is a software distributed shared memory (S-DSM) system designed for clusters of server-class machines. It is distinguished from most other S-DSM projects by (1) the effective use of fast user-level messaging, as provided by modern system-area ...

Interposition-based system enhancements for multitiered servers are difficult to build because important system context is typically lost at application and machine boundaries. For example, resource quotas and user identities do not propagate easily ...