abrai

Once Upon a CI, Or, How to eat lots of Ice Cream and Spread Happiness

There once lived a group of engineers who were building a software product. They were a happy bunch who liked hanging out, eating cupcakes and icecream, and coding. Their users liked the product and paid for…

Demystifying Consistency and Isolation for a Distributed Systems Engineer

Trip to Maui

This is a travelog of a trip that Manisha, Amarya, and I undertook of Maui in December 2016.

First some geological trivia to get your bearings. The island of Maui is geologically founded on two volcanoes of the Hawaiian volcano chain. The older volcano, which is now extinct, lies on the west of the…

Paxos

Paxos is the most efficient distributed consensus algorithm for asynchronous systems with non-Byzantine faults. There is no deterministic algorithm for always achieving consensus successfully in an asynchronous distributed system, but Paxos comes pretty close to doing so in reality for non-Byzantine faults.

The…

Notes from ISCA — ACLD 2009 Workshop

Jim Larus from Microsoft Research gave a nice overview of their research in the large datacenter space. He pointed out the problem of limited bisection bandwidth and how that prevents applications from running across clusters. Microsoft is working on a mesh network…

C++ super simplified

Caution: This blog post is the result of a long and boring flight. Also, my “C++ age” is little over an year, same being true for Python as well.

In the beginning there was C. C has a statically typed system which the compiler uses to verify type safety at compile…

Code Coverage and KLEE from OSDI 2008

I once wrote a coverage tool that randomly replaced function calls at runtime with one of the many values assumed by the output of the call (as determined at compile time). I did this for “well tested” systems code and was pleasantly surprised by the number of…