Readings in distributed systems | Hacker News Reader

Readings in distributed systems

christophermeiklejohn.com

111 pointscmeiklejohn14 comments

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These are the type of posts I come to hacker news for (sorry meteor evangelists and NSA watchdogs).

I'd also like to recommend the Spark Streaming Paper[0] for people interested in real-time distributed architectures.

0: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~matei/papers/2012/hotcloud_spark...

A pretty good text to have around is Distributed Systems Concepts and Design[1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Distributed-Systems-Concepts-Design-Ed...

Pull requests welcome. :)

great list, and thank you!

how would you recommend printing these out and binding them for my own personal copy in dead tree form? i ask because i like having these sorts of things on the shelf for reading and referencing, and taking notes in. i also want to do this with the "Great Works in Programming Languages" [1]. i've been wondering if something like Kinkos' "Book Binding" [2] would be usful here, but then i worry about the fact that they may not print it for me because the papers are copyright someone else.

thoughts? suggestions?

1. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/courses/670Fall04/GreatWo...

2. http://www.fedex.com/us/office/binding-finishing-laminating....

I'm not sure if this helps, but I worked for a summer in a UPS store a couple years back and I'm sure you'd be fine printing it either at UPS or fedex. People came in with papers/books/posters ect to be printed often and looking at copyright was never part of any check for using the company printers. Just throw it on a USB drive and they'll bring it to the store computer and print it for you, no questions asked.

Also, most UPS stores are equipped do this "book binding", so I'd shop for the cheapest "per page" price you can find at either store.

thanks, great to know!

I have used http://printme1.com/ for compiled PDF notes/papers (mostly because Lulu.com complains about mismatching page sizes).

I use Lulu for free/CC licensed books that are a single PDF file.

thank you! this is great to know.

You might also like the "Think Distributed" podcast:

http://thinkdistributed.io

The languages section seems a bit trendy and misses a lot of old-school work that predates the popularity of the m/r paradigm. I would suggest additions like Linda and tuple spaces and Hoare's csp paper (also somewhat trendy at the moment but still old-school.)

It's interesting how many problems the blockchain data structure solves for distributed systems.

Bitcoin uses (and invented) the blockchain as a way to solve the double-spend problem of distributed e-cash systems. But the fact that the blockchain solves the consensus problem without any trust makes it a compelling data structure for many other use-cases as well.

Even if bitcoin fails as a currency, academics will be referencing Satoshi Nakamoto's paper [1] for a long time to come.

[1] http://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Michael Bernstein had a great talk on Distributed Systems Archaeology at RICON West yesterday. Video coming soon, but here are the notes:

https://speakerdeck.com/mrb/distributed-systems-archaeology

This is great but does anyone have recommendations on getting started in distributed systems? I'm a lowly web developer and would like to get into this more.

Personally I started investigating and using a production system[1] which introduced a bunch of basic concepts and I read a few papers such as the Dynamo paper[2]. Then I went deeper into riak_core[3] and Erlang/OTP. At this point I have a context in which to read and understand more papers (such as those OP linked) and I've studied concepts such as Eventual Consistency, Vector Clocks, Map Reduce, Gossip Protocols, etc.

I'm not an expert by any means but I found this route to be a fun one and the riak/erlang related irc channels are awesome (and helpful) to hang around in.

[1] Riak: http://docs.basho.com/riak/latest/downloads/ [2] http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs239-w08/dec... [3] https://github.com/basho/riak_core [4] http://www.rgoarchitects.com/Files/fallacies.pdf

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