Paul Cavallaro

A colleague recently asked me for a list of technical books/blogs/resources that are worth reading.

Today’s paper is Beyond malloc efficiency to fleet efficiency: a hugepage-aware memory allocator by A.H.

Inspired by others who have written predictions in order to keep themselves accountable and to improve their predictive abilities, here are some predictions I have for 2022.

Every year as the weather chills, wreaths are hung, hot cocoa is sipped, and stores start playing the sweet dulcet tones of George Michael and Mariah Carey, our thoughts come to focus on Christmas.

Today’s paper is Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale from FaST ‘21.

I’ve been working on a distributed filesystem recently, which has exposed me to the POSIX permission system in more depth, and whoo, I’m convinced that POSIX permissions are weird and bad and can lead to some very surprising1 behavior.

In today’s post we’re going to talk about latencies in a common distributed system architecture: The root-leaf, or parent-child, fanout architecture.

Today’s blog post is an overview of some common optimization techniques and neat tricks for doing “systems programming” – whatever that means today.

Today’s paper is about how to implement an efficient and practical multi-word1 compare-and-swap operation.

The paper I’m writing about today is x86-TSO: A Rigorous and Usable Programmer’s Model for x86 Multiprocessors by Sewell, Sarkar, Owens, Nardelli, and Myreen.

So I had a resolution last year to read and write a blog post about 26 papers in 52 weeks.

There’s a quote I love from Ian Lance Taylor’s series on linkers about the complexity that creeps into them.

It seems almost an accepted wisdom in Software Engineering today that small, empowered, cross-functional teams are the best way to build software and products.

Today’s paper is from Facebook’s HHVM team: Optimizing Function Placement for Large-Scale Data-Center Applications.

Today’s paper is The Bw-Tree: A B-tree for New Hardware Platforms.

Today’s paper was written in 1987 by George Varghese and Tony Lauck from Digital Equipment Corporation (!)

Today we’re going to talk about a new development in the world of consensus protocols called Flexible Paxos from Heidi Howard, Dahlia Malkhi, and Alexander Spiegelman.

This paper by Joy Arulraj, Matthew Perron, and Andy Pavlo describes a new way to rethink the DBMS Write Ahead Log (WAL) for NVM technology.

52 Weeks, 26 Papers This year I had a few New Year’s resolutions, and one of them was to read and write up a short summary of one academic paper every two weeks.

Hi there!