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 pageZoom (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 pagelink]
Diaconu, C., Freedman, C., Ismert, E., et al. (2013). Hekaton: SQL Server’s Memory-Optimized OLTP Engine. In: SIGMOD. [external pagelink]
Arulraj, J., Pavlo, A. (2017). How to Build a Non-Volatile Memory Database Management System. In: SIGMOD. [external pagelink]
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 pagelink]

System Design

CAP Theorem:
Brewer, E. (2012). CAP Twelve Years Later: How the “Rules” Have Changed. In: Computer, 45(2). [external pagelink]
Abadi, D. (2012). Consistency Tradeoffs in Modern Distributed Database System Design: CAP is Only Part of the Story. In: Computer, 45(2). [external pagelink]
Attack of the Killer Microseconds:
Barroso, L., Marty, M., Patterson, D., & Ranganathan, P. (2017). Attack of the killer microseconds. In: CACM, 60(4). [external pagelink]
Primorac, M., Bugnion, E., & Argyraki, K. (2017). How to measure the killer microsecond. In: CCR, 47(5). [external pagelink]
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 pagelink]
Klimovic, A., Kozyrakis, C., Thereska, E., John, B., & Kumar, S. (2016). Flash storage disaggregation. In: EuroSys. [external pagelink]
Marty, M., de Kruijf, M., Adriaens, J., et al. (2019). Snap: a microkernel approach to host networking. In: SOSP 2019. [external pagelink]
Dalton, M., Schultz, D., Adriaens, J., et al. (2018). Andromeda: Performance, Isolation, and Velocity at Scale in Cloud Network Virtualization. In: NSDI. [external pagelink]

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 pagelink]
Corbett, J. C., Dean, J., Epstein, M., et al. (2012). Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database. In: OSDI. [external pagelink]
Bacon, D. F., Bales, N., Bruno, N., et al. (2017). Spanner: Becoming a SQL system. In: SIGMOD. [external pagelink]
Lakshman, A., & Malik, P. (2010). Cassandra: a decentralized structured storage system. In: SIGOPS Review, 44(2). [external pagelink1] [external pagelink2]
Dageville, B., Huang, J., Lee, A. W., et al. (2016). The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse. In: SIGMOD. [external pagelink]
Ousterhout, K., Rasti, R., Ratnasamy, S., Shenker, S., & Chun, B.-G. (2015). Making Sense of Performance in Data Analytics Frameworks. In: NSDI. [external pagelink]
Burrows, M. (2006). The Chubby lock service for loosely-coupled distributed systems. In: OSDI. [external pagelink]
DeCandia, G., Hastorun, D., Jampani, M., Kakulapati, et al. (2007). Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store. In: SIGOPS. [external pagelink]
Shafer, J., Rixner, S., & Cox, A. L. (2010). The Hadoop distributed filesystem: Balancing portability and performance. In: ISPASS. [external pagelink1] [external pagelink2]
Armbrust, M., Ghodsi, A., Zaharia, M., et al. (2015). Spark SQL: Relational Data Processing in Spark. In: SIGMOD. [lexternal pageink]
Hunt, P., Konar, M., Junqueira, F. P., & Reed, B. (2019). ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for internet-scale systems. In: USENIX ATC. [external pagelink]
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 pagelink]
Shankar, V., Krauth, K., Vodrahalli, K., Pu, Q., et al. (2020). Serverless linear algebra. In: SoCC. [external pagelink]
Klimovic, A., Wang, Y., Stuedi, P., et al. (2018). Pocket: Elastic Ephemeral Storage for Serverless Analytics. In: OSDI.
[external pagelink]
Müller, I., Marroquín, R., & Alonso, G. (2020). Lambada: Interactive Data Analytics on Cold Data Using Serverless Cloud Infrastructure. In: SIGMOD. [external pagelink]