...
- Part that was most satisfying and want to see even more - experimentation - e.g., loved talks on rdma, and data from fb - even if its still raw
- systems that are driven by analysis of real data - are neat. we build lot of systems from intuition. so its great to see this (systems being driven by analysis of data) happening. keep this up.
- ramcloud: finally is going to include backend storage that is much slower - separation between access latencies upstream and cold, slow storage - how do you take care of these tiers - how do you warm up these caches, and working sets - how are you going to use high capacity, slow storage at the backend, and still provide high performance to apps
- Basically, think beyond RAM - datasets are going to be much larger than would fit in RAM
- dctcp: really want to see bsd implementation
- data center scheduling problem (Chritisina): think about: caching is becoming imp for app perf - scheduling becomes very constrained - can do you do something about moving things to places where there is common data that's already in cache - that will help improve data center scheduling.
- logistics: great place, very well organized, perfect time, right distance for bay area people
Shel Finkelstein, SAP
Had fun, enjoyed discussions, location, game-playing.
Diego's talk: A lot of fear and loathing of Paxos. Wants to see an open-source version of Paxos that performs really well. Interesting work.
Alex's talk: Spoke to Alex offline, thinks use of RDMA is good.
Christina's talk: wants to see the QoS scheduling work go from simulation to measurement
Bill's talk was really exciting
Asaf's talk: interested in economic impact, mean time to repair issues, techniques for keeping the business running with intermittent failure vs 3TB loss.
Berk's talk: need to understand ideas better
Steve's talk: a little hard to understand memory utilization, would be interesting to see how larger memory sizes affect this
Elliot's talk: what about range queries? Would this be possible? Locality issues: how quickly can I enumerate a range?
Satya Nishtala, Cisco
First time at a retreat. Came because he was interested in RAMCloud.
Problems discussed: how do you access key-value pairs spread across the datacenter, what are the problems associated with it, and what are the solutions.
Wants to see more of this in the future.
Fundamentally a product guy: wants to see how this gets applied into applications and integrated into systems in the future.
Abdul Kabbani, Google
Definitely learned a lot. Sees applicability in especially Christina, Asaf's talks in platforms at Google.
Priority queuing scheme and dropping talk was interesting.
Wants to see more about DCTCP.
The RAMCloud talks weren't really his area, but he learned a lot from them too.
DCTCP update: didn't fly in IETF because it's limited to datacenter. Need more lobbying in the IETF community. That would be the first step to have it happen. People at Stanford are still fixing bugs and verifying the implementation. Working with Scott Vimal to get DCTCP into Linux, not doing this on LKML yet.
Nathan Schrenk, Facebook
There wasn't much about DCTCP at this event, but he'd like to hear about why DCTCP hasn't gotten it accepted into the Linux kernel. Could provide wider adoption of that work.
Really enjoyed Bill's talk. Wants to know when he'll start a company.
The copysets talk was interesting. He wants a copy of the paper to share with people at Facebook.
Rajesh Nishtala, Facebook
Often see all-to-all communication pattern in a social network. Start getting into full bisection bandwidth and related concepts.
Would really encourage the kind of research about how to fetch data from a wide variety of sources.
Example: If I'm fetching my news feed within a front-end cluster, the contents of the stories throughout that newsfeed will be scattered throughout the entire cluster.
Encourages us to adopt the "move fast and break things" philosophy. Get into this model of rapid prototypes and see what sticks.
They've seen a lot of big stuff come out of this approach, trying out random things and seeing what sticks.
Rainer Brendle, SAP
This retreat succeeded at making him think.
We have low latency and they've become available. What kind of impact does it have? What is driving that forward? How can I get my hand on it? How can I use it?
The best thing about bad, high latency is that I can cure[?] it by adding more layers [caching?].
Removing layers is a hard game. It involves a lot of people.
But it's an issue we will have to do, because physics drives this.
How does this happen? How does the industry build a low latency network become obsolete.
Everything becomes thinner or goes away. A lot of things change.
Shankar Pasupathy, NetApp
The value for people like us is that this kind of event makes you think.
It would have been great to have a 1 hour technical overview about RAMCloud. It's been two years for him.
Wants to have the poster session on the first day so that you gets to meet the students and mull over the ideas.
Preview of hard problems to solve at the end.
A demo might have been nice.
Great location, right amount of time.
Wants to have the slides made available to share with people in his group.
Asaf's talk was fascinating. Is three copies the right number? What's the right number for RAMCloud?
What does this super-fast recovery enable you to do differently from a disk space system?
Wants to hear our thoughts about an application.
Wants to use RAMCloud as a giant redirector. In storage, names and locations are tied together. For [how many?] objects, needs 32TB to do these lookups.
Look at Ceph for pseudo-random placement to not have to go to the coordinator.
How do you understand that you've solved all the corner cases, and at scale?
What would you do with a lot of spare cores? Compress the RAM? Inline deduplicate?
Didn't understand if we do checksums or periodic scrubbing on the data on backups and/or in memory.
Believes persistent RAM will become real in a decade, with the same characteristics as DRAM.
Calculate if the flash we're using will even last three years.
When you take server design for RAMCloud, do you look at 5 or 10 years down the line, when this will possibly become a product (in terms of trends in memory)?
Ed Bugnion, Stanford
The strength is these are different projects, faculty, interests operating at different levels.
Fascinated by the synergies, how the different projects motivate each other.
It'd be good if some of the industry members want to give a talk, could have one or two talks from industry members to share their perspective and speak to the students.
Someone suggested creating a forum (or facebook group) for ongoing discussions.