My last metastable blog post discussed the interactions between systems and components and how they can lead to metastable failures. Specifically, I looked at interactions between systems/components and how signals can be misinterpreted by different systems due to ambiguity — a timeout may mean a transient fault that can be fixed by retrying, but it [ ]
Self-Defining Systems (SDS) by Thomas Anderson, Ratul Mahajan, Simon Peter, and Luke Zettlemoyer is a bold proposal for AI-driven systems research. In SDS, agentic “engineers” get the system specification and operating environment specification, then design and build the systems to spec. Crucially, as the specification or environment changes, an army of agents should notice and [ ]
The Cloudspecs: Cloud Hardware Evolution Through the Looking Glass CIDR paper by Till Steinert, Maximilian Kuschewski, and Viktor Leis was the first paper I and Murat read this year. It was a short, but interesting read. Below is our reading video and my one-paragraph summary. The paper discusses the evolution of AWS cloud (virtual) hardware [ ]
Murat and Aleksey read Rethinking the Cost of Distributed Caches for Datacenter Services. This paper argues that distributed caches can save money by reducing CPU costs despite using substantially more of the costly DRAM. The authors claim up to 4X savings in synthetic and open-source workloads. The paper also calls for richer caching semantics to [ ]
I ve written about metastable failures before. The topic has been picked up by a few different teams since the, all analyzing metastable failures more, while I apparently has been slacking off Anyway, Metastable failures are self-sustaining performance failures that arise in systems due to a positive feedback loop triggered by an initial problem. This positive [ ]
The Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research paper by Audrey Cheng, Shu Liu, Melissa Pan, Zhifei Li, Bowen Wang, Alexander Krentsel, Tian Xia, Mert Cemri, Jongseok Park, Shuo Yang, Jeff Chen, Lakshya Agrawal, Aditya Desai, Jiarong Xing, Koushik Sen, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica from Berkeley has recently made a splash in [ ]
Instead of reading papers, last night, Murat and I engaged in an interesting discussion on skills, traits, and qualities needed for a PhD. This discussion came as a follow-up to Murat s recent blog on The Invisible Curriculum of Research. In his blog, Murat discusses Curiosity, Clarity, Craft, Community, and Courage as skills/qualities of a good [ ]
I will be presenting our new paper, HoliPaxos: Towards More Predictable Performance in State Machine Replication, at the VLDB 25. Feel free to ping me if you are there and want to chat! This paper explores several orthogonal optimizations to the classical MultiPaxos state machine replication protocol to improve its performance stability in the presence of [ ]
Here is a list for the Fall 2025 semester. Please join the reading group here: https://discord.gg/VS7J4PAU58. We meet on Thursdays. The schedule is also available on our calendar.
The last paper we covered in the Distributed Systems Reading group discussed CPUs, data centers, scheduling, and carbon emissions we read The Sunk Carbon Fallacy: Rethinking Carbon Footprint Metrics for Effective Carbon-Aware Scheduling. Below is my improvised presentation of this paper for the reading group. This paper was an educational read for me, as I learned [ ]