Aleksey Charapko

My last metastable blog post discussed the interactions between systems and components and how they can lead to metastable failures.

Self-Defining Systems (SDS) by Thomas Anderson, Ratul Mahajan, Simon Peter, and Luke Zettlemoyer is a bold proposal for AI-driven systems research.

The “Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass” CIDR paper by Till Steinert, Maximilian Kuschewski, and Viktor Leis was the first paper I and Murat read this year.

Murat and Aleksey read “Rethinking the Cost of Distributed Caches for Datacenter Services.“ This paper argues that distributed caches can save money by reducing CPU costs despite using substantially more of the costly DRAM.

I’ve written about metastable failures before.

The “Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research” paper by Audrey Cheng, Shu Liu, Melissa Pan, Zhifei Li, Bowen Wang, Alexander Krentsel, Tian Xia, Mert Cemri, Jongseok Park, Shuo Yang, Jeff Chen, Lakshya Agrawal, Aditya Desai, Jiarong Xin…

Instead of reading papers, last night, Murat and I engaged in an interesting discussion on skills, traits, and qualities needed for a PhD.

I will be presenting our new paper, “HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication,” at the VLDB’25.

Here is a list for the Fall 2025 semester.

The last paper we covered in the Distributed Systems Reading group discussed CPUs, data centers, scheduling, and carbon emissions—we read “The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling.”