SIGOPS

As modern operating systems become more complex, understanding their inner workings is increasingly difficult. Dynamic kernel instrumentation is a well established method of obtaining insight into the workings of an OS, with applications including ...

This paper is concerned with performance debugging of multi-tier applications, such as commonly found in servers and dynamic-content web sites. Existing tools and techniques for profiling such applications are not general enough to track and profile ...

Real production applications ranging from enterprise applications to large e-commerce sites share a crucial but seldom-noted characteristic: The relative frequencies of transaction types in their workloads are nonstationary, i.e., the transaction mix ...

The major chip manufacturers have all introduced chip multiprocessing (CMP) and simultaneous multithreading (SMT) technology into their processing units. As a result, even low-end computing systems and game consoles have become shared memory ...

Dryad is a general-purpose distributed execution engine for coarse-grain data-parallel applications. A Dryad application combines computational "vertices" with communication "channels" to form a dataflow graph. Dryad runs the application by executing ...

Hardware trends suggest that large-scale CMP architectures, with tens to hundreds of processing cores on a single piece of silicon, are iminent within the next decade. While existing CMP machines have traditionally been handled in the same way as SMPs, ...

Failure detectors are fundamental building blocks in distributed systems. Multi-node failure detectors, where the detector is tasked with monitoring N other nodes, play a critical role in overlay networks and peer-to-peer systems. In such networks, ...

Most implementations of critical Internet protocols are written in type-unsafe languages such as C or C++ and are regularly vulnerable to serious security and reliability problems. Type-safe languages eliminate many errors but are not used to due to the ...

The vulnerabilities that plague computers cause endless grief to users. Slammer compromised millions of hosts in minutes; a hit-list worm would take under a second. Recently proposed techniques respond better than manual approaches, but require ...

Virtual memory has been successfully used in different domains to extend the amount of memory available to applications. We have adapted this mechanism to sensor networks, where, traditionally, RAM is a severely constrained resource. In this paper we ...

Sensor networks are increasingly being deployed for a wide variety of tasks. Today, in these networks, the development, deployment, and maintenance of applications are performed largely ad-hoc. Existing platforms help somewhat but also introduce ...

In this paper, we present COSMOS, a novel architecture for macroprogramming heterogeneous sensor network systems. Macroprogramming specifies aggregate system behavior, as opposed to device-specific programs that code distributed behavior using explicit ...

Two oft-cited file systems, the Fast File System (FFS) and the Log-Structured File System (LFS), adopt two sharply different update strategies---update-in-place and update-out-of-place. This paper introduces the design and implementation of a hybrid ...

During concurrent I/O workloads, sequential access to one I/O stream can be interrupted by accesses to other streams in the system. Frequent switching between multiple sequential I/O streams may severely affect I/O efficiency due to long disk seek and ...

In typical file systems, valuable data is vulnerable to being accidentally or maliciously deleted or overwritten. Versioning file systems protect data from accidents by transparently retaining old versions, but do less well in protecting data from ...

Recent research has found that operators frequently misconfigure Internet services, causing various availability and performance problems. In this paper, we propose a software infrastructure that eliminates several types of misconfiguration by ...

In this paper, we extensively tune and then compare the performance of web servers based on three different server architectures. The μserver utilizes an event-driven architecture, Knot uses the highly-efficient Capriccio thread library to implement a ...

As mobile and embedded devices become widespread, the management and configuration of the software in the devices is increasingly turning into a critical issue. OSGi is a business standard for the life cycle management of Java software components. It is ...

Understanding the detailed behavior of an operating system is crucial for making informed design decisions. But such an understanding is very hard to achieve, due to the increasing complexity of such systems and the fact that they are implemented and ...

Hypervisors, popularized by Xen and VMware, are quickly becoming commodity. They are appropriate for many usage scenarios, but there are scenarios that require system virtualization with high degrees of both isolation and efficiency. Examples include ...

Data centers are often under-utilized due to over-provisioning as well as time-varying resource demands of typical enterprise applications. One approach to increase resource utilization is to consolidate applications in a shared infrastructure using ...

As information technology (IT) administration becomes increasingly complex, workflow technologies are gaining popularity for IT automation. Writing correct workflow programs is notoriously difficult. Although static analysis tools are available, fixing ...

Software transactional memory (STM) is a promising technique for controlling concurrency in modern multi-processor architectures. STM aims to be more scalable than explicit coarse-grained locking and easier to use than fine-grained locking. However, STM ...

Continuously running systems require kernel software updates applied to them without downtime. Facilitating fast reboots, or delaying an update may not be a suitable solution in many environments, especially in pay-per-use high-performance computing ...

In most modern operating systems, a process is a hardware-protected abstraction for isolating code and data. This protection, however, is selective. Many common mechanisms---dynamic code loading, run-time code generation, shared memory, and intrusive ...

We describe a new design for authorization in operating systems in which applications are first-class entities. In this design, principals reflect application identities. Access control lists are patterns that recognize principals. We present a security ...

Antiquity is a wide-area distributed storage system designed to provide a simple storage service for applications like file systems and back-up. The design assumes that all servers eventually fail and attempts to maintain data despite those failures. ...

Sprint is a middleware infrastructure for high performance and high availability data management. It extends the functionality of a standalone in-memory database (IMDB) server to a cluster of commodity shared-nothing servers. Applications accessing an ...

We present a memory-aware load balancing (MALB) technique to dispatch transactions to replicas in a replicated database. Our MALB algorithm exploits knowledge of the working sets of transactions to assign them to replicas in such a way that they execute ...