Usability Features and Research Topics

This page describes a prioritized list of desired usability features for RAMCloud as well as potential research topics.

Usability

Possible features to improve usability:

  • [All] Make 10 gig ethernet work (solarflare ethernet NICs)
  • [7] Docs / script to make starting a cluster trivially easy
  • [6] Get it to run on Amazon
  • [4] Actual packages for distros
  • [3] Dashboard / web agent console
  • [3] More examples in documentation
  • [3] Better tablet management
    • recovery
  • [2] Competitive benchmarking
  • [1] Asynchronous writes
  • [1] Richer conditional operations
  • [1] Notify clients when value changes
  • [0] Multi-tenancy
  • [0] Backup facility
  • [0] How you buy the cluster you would need
  • [0] Infrastructure as a service
  • [0] Run on Emulab
  • [0] Default DEBUG=no
  • [0] Discussion forums
  • [0] FAQ
  • [0] Indexes

Research

Potential research topics:

  • Data model
    • Indexes
    • Transactions
    • Graph/Set
    • Relational
  • Multi-tenancy, security
  • Benchmarks under load, tail latency
  • Scalable, low-latency RPC for the datacenter
  • Data placement, consolidation
  • Analytics in RAMCloud
  • Code uploading
  • Scalability, simulator
  • Reusable broadcast mechanism