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I have seen things
I still don't have any idea what Instagram or Facebook stories is. Tried Googling and still don't have a good idea about it. — Murat Dem...
Murat Demirbas
On distributed systems broadly defined and other curiosities. The opinions on this site are my own.
- Popular posts
- 30
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- #178 personal
Visit muratbuffalo.blogspot.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Sep 2014 – Oct 2026
Systems & Performance 18Databases & Data 11Life, Learning & Writing 9Career & Management 5AI & Machine Learning 4Software Engineering 3
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Learning Machine Learning: A beginner's journey
I have been learning about machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL) for the last year. I think ML/DL is here to stay. I don't think this i...
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The end of a myth: Distributed transactions can scale
This paper appeared in VLDB'17. The paper presents NAM-DB, a scalable distributed database system that uses RDMA (mostly 1-way RDMA) and a ...
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Facebook's software architecture
I had summarized/discussed a couple papers ( Haystack , Memcache caching ) about Facebook's architecture before. Facebook uses simple arch...
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Foundational Distributed Systems Papers
I talked about the importance of reading foundational papers last week. To followup, here is my compilation of foundational papers in the d...
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A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
I have come to suspect that to most people thinking is painful. Some of us are addicted to thinking. Some of us find it a necessity. Johnny ...
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Paper review: IPFS – Content addressed, versioned, P2P file system
This week we discussed the IPFS whitepaper by Juan Benet in my Distributed Systems Seminar. Remember peer-to-peer systems? IPFS is "pe...
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The need for tooling and the need for mastering your tools
Couple months ago, a friend sent me this article about "Speed learner Max Deutsch challenging chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen". My friend ...
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File systems unfit as distributed storage back ends: 10 years of Ceph
This paper is by Abutalib Aghayev (Carnegie Mellon University), Sage Weil (Red Hat Inc.), Michael Kuchnik (Carnegie Mellon University), Mar...
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Learning about distributed systems: where to start? (2020)
This is definitely not a "learn distributed systems in 21 days" post. I recommend a principled, from the foundations-up, studying of distrib...
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FoundationDB: A distributed unbundled transactional key value store
This paper from Sigmod 2021 presents FoundationDB, a transactional key-value store that supports multi-key strictly serializable transacti...
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My Time at MIT
Twenty years ago, in 2004-2005, I spent a year at MIT’s Computer Science department as a postdoc working with Professor Nancy Lynch. It was ...
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Azure Cosmos DB: Microsoft's Cloud-Born Globally Distributed Database
It has been almost 9 months since I started my sabbatical work with the Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB team. I knew what I signed up for then...
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Paxos derived
Lamport's fault-intolerant state machine replication algorithm In 1978, Lamport published his classic "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of E...
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Looming Liability Machines (LLMs)
As part of our zoom reading group ( wow, 4.5 years old now ), we discussed a paper that uses LLMs for automatic root cause analysis (RCA) fo...
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The safest job from AI may be writing
Today, tech folk are scrambling to change their workflows to meet newly inflated 5X productivity quotas, while getting pummeled under the co...
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Making database systems usable
C. J. Date's Sigmod 1983 keynote, "Database Usability", was prescient. Usability is the most important thing to the customers. They care les...
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Two-phase commit and beyond
In this post, we model and explore the two-phase commit protocol using TLA+. The two-phase commit protocol is practical and is used in man...
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The F Word
Back in 2005, when I first joined the SUNY Buffalo CSE department, the department secretary was a wonderful lady named Joann, who was over 6...
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TLA+ Modeling Tips
Model minimalistically Start from a tiny core, and always keep a working model as you extend. Your default should be omission. Add a compone...
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Realtime Data Processing at Facebook
Recently there has been a lot of development in realtime data processing systems, including Twitter's Storm and Heron, Google's Millwheel, a...
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The Two Abstractions of System Design: Hide or Reduce
When talking about TLA+, I keep referring to "abstraction" as the most important thing to learn . And it is about the hardest to learn as w...
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Graviton2 and Graviton3
What do modern cloud workloads look like? And what does that have to do with new chip designs? I found these gems in Peter DeSantis's ReInve...
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A Comparison of Distributed Machine Learning Platforms
This paper surveys the design approaches used in distributed machine learning (ML) platforms and proposes future research directions. This ...
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Speedy transactions in multicore in-memory databases
This paper is from SOSP'13. The Polyjuice paper, which we studied last week, built on the Silo codebase and commit protocol, which led me ...
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My Distributed Systems Seminar's Reading List for Spring 2017
Below is the first draft list of papers I plan to discuss in my distributed systems seminar in the Spring semester. If you have some suggest...
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PigPaxos: Removing the Scalability Bottlenecks in Paxos
This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . Th...
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Chess invariants
Chess is a lot trickier than it looks. It has so many rules: castling, en passant, pawn promotion, pinning, the discovered check, and the de...
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Progress Beats Perfect
This is a favorite saying of mine. I use it to motivate myself when I feel disheartened about how much I have to learn and improve. If I do ...
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ZooKeeper: Wait-free coordination for Internet-scale systems
Zookeeper is an Apache project for providing coordination services to distributed systems. ZooKeeper aims to provide a simple kernel (a fil...