Benchmarks defines two so-called tiers: performance and scale-up. The former considers latency and throughput as offered load increases with a fixed amount of resources. The latter looks at traditional scale-up (does performance stay flat as more data, offered load and resources are added) and elastic speedup (does performance improve if more resources are added under constant load). Benchmark is designed to be extensible, but core workload consists of randomized inserts, updates, reads and sequential scans of keyed records. Benchmark is implemented as a multi-threaded Java program with an interface layer used to customize interactions with specific data managers. Not clear whether this is a closed-loop or open-loop client.

Argues that many web applications need atomic multi-key access. Allows definition of transient, arbitrary key-groups, across which atomic operations are possible. Key groups are implemented by transferring ownership of all keys in a group to a single leader node in the underlying storage system, so that it can coordinate atomic operations without the need for a distributed coordination protocol. Leader uses write-ahead logging to support failure recovery at the leader node. However, it seems that while the leader is down, the group is unavailable.

Restricted application programming model supporting common architectural patterns for web services. Dataflow programming model with nodes representing computation and edges representing data flow.

Tech-lite article talking about virtualization on hand-held devices, about virtualization for software deployment, and about performance and management.

Proposes that data be assigned to one of three consistency levels: A, B, or C. Data assigned to level C have only session consistency and eventual consistency of updates. Data assigned to level A have serializable consistency. Data in the B category have adaptive consistency, switching between session consistency and serializability at runtime.

Snowflock implements an fork (clone) operation for running VMs. The is no implicit synchronization or communication between parent and clone after the fork - anything required must be coded explicitly. Cloned children live on a virtual network with the parent, and can only communicate within this network. SnowFlock starts clones with little initial state, and additional state is shipped on demand from the parent, which uses copy-on-write to preserve a snapshot of its state as of the time of cloning. Each clone gets a virtual disk which is a snapshot of the parent's as of the time of cloning. This is implemented with using copy-on-write at the parent, which serves pages to the clones (via blocktap) as necessary. This mechanism is intended for the root device, not for I/O intensive data devices.

Mostly a how-to guide for system admistrators, covering Containers, Solaris xVM and Solaris xVM VirtualBox.

demo paper

Compares Xen, OpenVZ, and base Linux configurations. Looks at two-tier (Apache+PHP and MySQL) system under a RUBiS workload. Considers a variety of configurations: both tiers on a single physical node, each tier on a different node, and multiple application stacks with the web tiers on one node and the database tiers on another node. Found higher CPU overhead in the Xen configuration, relative to OpenVZ and base Linux. Found that Xen DomU had much higher L2 cache miss count than the base Linux system, but is it not clear how much of this is from the kernel in DomU and how much is from the application.

Key space is partitioned into ranges called tablets. BigTable uses multiple independent tablet servers to serve tablets. Tablets are assigned to servers by a BigTable master node. One server at a time per tablet. Tablet server uses a commit log in GFS to commit updates. Recent updates are kept in memory in a memtable. When the memtable fills, it is written to GFS as an immutable SSTable file.

Resource providers make resources available to brokers, which in turn use them to satisy requests from clients. Clients get lease tickets from brokers, which understand which resources are available from which providers, and which implement polcies controlling which clients get which resources. Clients can redeem tickets with resource providers to obtain the lease, which gives the client access to resources for a fixed time window. Shirako is a toolkit to facilitate the constrution of clients, brokers, and resource providers.

Discusses the process of preparing software applications and application stacks for execution in a utility computing environment.

Proposes a programming model for highly parallelizable computations, and describes a system that implements this model. The computation input is a set of input key/value pairs, and the output is a set of output key/value pairs. The computation itself is defined by two functions. A Map function takes an input key value pair and produces a set of intermediate key/value pairs. A Reduce function takes an intermediate key and a set of values, and produces a single value.

Very nice paper describing the hardware virtualization approach used by Xen and changes it necessitates in the OS. Also includes some empirical performance evaluation.

An overview of some data-related parts of the grid standardization process, including OGSA, DAIS (Data Access and Integration) for standarizing access to relational and XML data sources, OREP (OGSA Replication Services), and DFDL (Data Format and Description Language).

Extended version can be found at http://www.globus.org/research/papers/ogsa.pdf. This is an overview of the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA), which is defines something very much like a distributed object system.

Defines the core services of a data grid as a file-oriented storage service plus a distributed directory for meta-data. Also has some discussion of higher level services, like replication.