Pierre-Evariste Dagand developed Opis, an OCaml-based framework for developing distributed systems. It includes yet another Chord implementation, tested in ModelNet against Macedon and MIT Chord. While I still think OCaml is kind of ugly, it appeals to me more than P2 or Macedon did. (via Anarchaia)
Part of my research has been investigating how to build storage systems that can provide availability and durability despite failures. It’s been interesting to see recent papers that characterize failures, such as Ethan Katz-Bassett’s NSDI paper about Hubble, or last year’s papers about drive failure characteristics from Google and from several high performance computing [...]
When switching to a new version control system, it is important to be able to bring along all the past history of a project. There are several tools capable of converting a CVS repository to Mercurial; I have considered cvs20hg, tailor and Mercurial’s own convert-repo. While these all do the conversion, careful testing of the results is necessary. [...]
Over the past few years, distributed version control systems have flourished; there are now so many that is hard to choose between them. Each choice offers an evolution beyond CVS including, among other things, whole-tree views with atomic commits, complete and transparent offline operation, and excellent branching support. Always on the look out for better tools, I have played with [...]
I haven’t used the SunGrid this week. In fact, no one has: there was a four day outage from last Saturday morning through this morning. I received a notification about this last Wednesday evening. In compensation, Sun has credited me (and presumably everyone) with 100 additional free CPU hours, which was thoughtful. However, if the IPTPS submission [...]
The SunGrid is an on-demand grid computing infrastructure: you pay per CPU-hour as you need it, Sun provides the hardware. I recently got access to the SunGrid as part of a generous grant of CPU hours by Sun to my research lab, CSAIL, and I’m mostly quite pleased with it.
John Powers rightly notes that it is not trivial to [...]
The official conference report for NSDI 2006 (PDF, 208K) has been published in the August 2006 issue of ;login:. These notes were taken by students in exchange for travel scholarships. In comparison to the summaries I published in May, the official report covers the session I missed on the first day while preparing for my own talk.
Today, Robert O’Callahan stopped by MIT as part of his US Tour. He works for Novell is one of the “super reviewers” at the Mozilla Foundation. If you use FireFox (like 63% of my visitors this week), you probably run code he’s touched. He also wrote TTSSH, an SSH client that I linked to from my homepage for [...]
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