Design Review

This page contains materials related to the design review held at Stanford on April 1, 2010 and attended by a collection of reviewers from industry and academia.

Slides from Presentations

• (John Ousterhout)

• (Steve Rumble)

• (Ryan Stutsman)

• (Mendel Rosenblum)

• (Aravind Narayanan)

• (Diego Ongaro)

• (Ryan Stutsman)

• (Diego Ongaro)

Session Notes

• Overview

• Durability

• Recovery

• Assumptions

• Low-Latency RPC

• Transactions

• Indexing

• Cluster Management

• Final Comments

Additional Information

• Email comments from Jim Larus

Conclusions

After discussing all the visitor comments, we made a list of the most important overall suggestions to consider as the project evolves:

• Leverage existing technologies, such as:

  • ZooKeeper

  • Infiniband

  • Network file systems?

• Compression: how can it be incorporated into the system architecture?

• Locality may be more important that we have been thinking. Some examples of how to expose/encourage/support locality:

  • Provide a multiget operation so that several objects can be fetched in a single RPC.

  • Allow applications to find out where objects are stored.

  • Allow applications to ensure that objects are colocated on the same server. For example, allow applications to request that certain tablets always be colocated in the same server partition.

  • Allow code to be shipped to servers?

• Many people liked the idea of making a fast RPC system available separately from the rest of RAMCloud, if that's possible.

• Applications: lots of encouragement to seek out appropriate applications for RAMCloud and use them to guide the design decisions.

• When measuring performance, measure distributions (e.g. 90th percentile), not just average or best-case performance.