Operating Systems Review 

About: Operating Systems Review is an academic journal published by Association for Computing Machinery. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Server & Scheduling (computing). It has an ISSN identifier of 0163-5980. Over the lifetime, 1420 publications have been published receiving 44738 citations. The journal is also known as: ACM SIGOPS operating systems review.

Cassandra: a decentralized structured storage system

Abstract: Cassandra is a distributed storage system for managing very large amounts of structured data spread out across many commodity servers, while providing highly available service with no single point of failure. Cassandra aims to run on top of an infrastructure of hundreds of nodes (possibly spread across different data centers). At this scale, small and large components fail continuously. The way Cassandra manages the persistent state in the face of these failures drives the reliability and scalability of the software systems relying on this service. While in many ways Cassandra resembles a database and shares many design and implementation strategies therewith, Cassandra does not support a full relational data model; instead, it provides clients with a simple data model that supports dynamic control over data layout and format. Cassandra system was designed to run on cheap commodity hardware and handle high write throughput while not sacrificing read efficiency.

CUBIC: a new TCP-friendly high-speed TCP variant

Abstract: CUBIC is a congestion control protocol for TCP (transmission control protocol) and the current default TCP algorithm in Linux. The protocol modifies the linear window growth function of existing TCP standards to be a cubic function in order to improve the scalability of TCP over fast and long distance networks. It also achieves more equitable bandwidth allocations among flows with different RTTs (round trip times) by making the window growth to be independent of RTT -- thus those flows grow their congestion window at the same rate. During steady state, CUBIC increases the window size aggressively when the window is far from the saturation point, and the slowly when it is close to the saturation point. This feature allows CUBIC to be very scalable when the bandwidth and delay product of the network is large, and at the same time, be highly stable and also fair to standard TCP flows. The implementation of CUBIC in Linux has gone through several upgrades. This paper documents its design, implementation, performance and evolution as the default TCP algorithm of Linux.

The Akamai network: a platform for high-performance internet applications

Abstract: Comprising more than 61,000 servers located across nearly 1,000 networks in 70 countries worldwide, the Akamai platform delivers hundreds of billions of Internet interactions daily, helping thousands of enterprises boost the performance and reliability of their Internet applications. In this paper, we give an overview of the components and capabilities of this large-scale distributed computing platform, and offer some insight into its architecture, design principles, operation, and management.

An introduction to Docker for reproducible research

Abstract: As computational work becomes more and more integral to many aspects of scientific research, computational reproducibility has become an issue of increasing importance to computer systems researchers and domain scientists alike Though computational reproducibility seems more straight forward than replicating physical experiments, the complex and rapidly changing nature of computer environments makes being able to reproduce and extend such work a serious challenge In this paper, I explore common reasons that code developed for one research project cannot be successfully executed or extended by subsequent researchers I review current approaches to these issues, including virtual machines and workflow systems, and their limitations I then examine how the popular emerging technology Docker combines several areas from systems research - such as operating system virtualization, cross-platform portability, modular re-usable elements, versioning, and a 'DevOps' philosophy, to address these challenges I illustrate this with several examples of Docker use with a focus on the R statistical environment

Epidemic algorithms for replicated database maintenance

Abstract: When a database is replicated at many sites, maintaining mutual consistency among the sites in the face of updates is a significant problem. This paper describes several randomized algorithms for distributing updates and driving the replicas toward consistency. The algorithms are very simple and require few guarantees from the underlying communication system, yet they ensure that the effect of every update is eventually reflected in all replicas. The cost and performance of the algorithms are tuned by choosing appropriate distributions in the randomization step. The algorithms are closely analogous to epidemics, and the epidemiology literature aids in understanding their behavior. One of the algorithms has been implemented in the Clearinghouse servers of the Xerox Corporate Internet. solving long-standing problems of high traffic and database inconsistency.