Blog posts
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Operating System Transactions – Summary and notes
This post is a cliff notes version I scrapped together after reading the paper Operating Systems Transactions. Although I strongly recommend you read the paper if you are interested in how the authors pulled inspiration from database systems to create a transactional operating system, this post should give you a good high overview if you…
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Snapshotting my understanding of MapReduce
Like my previous posts on snapshotting my understanding of gRPC and shapshotting my understanding of barrier synchronization, this post captures my understanding of MapReduce, a technology I’ve never been exposed to before. The purpose of these types of posts is to allow future self to look back and be proud of what I learned since…
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RioVista – Summary and notes
Introduction Key Words: ACID, transactions, synchronous I/O RioVista picks up where LRVM left off and aims for a performance conscience transaction. In other words, how can RioVista reduce the overhead of synchronous I/O, attracting system designers to use transactions System Crash Key Words: power crash, software crash, UPS power supply Super interesting concept that makes…
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Lightweight recoverable virtual machine – Summary and Notes
Summary and main take away As system designers, we can make persistence into the virtual memory manager, offering persistence to application developers. However, it’s no easy feat: we need to ensure that the solution performs well. To this end, the virtual machine manager offers an API that allows developer to wrap their code in transactions;…
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Distributed File Systems – Summary and notes
This lesson introduces network file system (NFS) and presents the problems with it, bottlenecks including limited cache and expensive input/output (I/O) operations. These problems motivate the need for a distributed file system, in which there is no longer a centralized server. Instead, there are multiple clients and servers that play various roles including serving data…
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Daily Review: Day ending in 2020/11/11
The last couple days at work have taken a toll on me emotionally. To lift me up, Jess used her arts and crafts skills to make a doll — made from Metric’s shedded hair (see featured image). Family Felt myself tear up when pushing Elliott in the stroller. The two of us were having a…
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Testing your gRPC services using grpc_cli
This post may be helpful for you if you are building gRPC services and want a convenient way to test your service using a command line tool. Similar to using cURL when testing HTTP(s) services, I wanted an easy way to test the gRPC services that I’m building. Originally, I had originally planned to whip…
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3 tips on getting eyeballs on your code review
“Why is nobody reviewing my code?” I sometimes witness new engineers (or even seasoned engineers new to the company) submit code reviews that end up sitting idle, gaining zero traction. Often, these code reviews get published but comments never flow in, leaving the developer left scratching their head, wondering why nobody seems to be taking…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/05
Family Assembled our Berkey water filtering system. The instructions are quite complicated, actually. In addition to reading the manuals, I had to pull up a couple instructional YouTube videos to make sure that I was priming the filters correctly. Took Elliott on a late night walk. She had missed her nap and we needed to…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/04
My favorite part of the day was waking up to a video that Jess recorded while I was asleep, a video capturing a little frog dancing on our window facing the backyard. My wife: she’s super cute. Work Hosted and moderated a tech panel on career growth and promotions. On behalf of Asians@ at Amazon,…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/03
Family Jess and I felt nervous about the presidential election results while watching the news online. Despite Biden leading in the polls, just as Hilary four years ago back in 2016, I’m sitting at the edge of my seat as the results come in, not confident at all that Biden can pull off a victory.…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/02
Family Elliott and I drove to Lowe’s home improvement store and picked up a new faucet. Normally, Elliott will cry after sitting in the car for more than 10 minutes but not this trip. She did amazing and the two us had a blast at Lowe’s and she helped me select our new faucet since…
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Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/11/01
No Halloween this year I used to love Halloween growing up, not so much the dressing up part but the knocking on doors and getting handed fist fulls of candy. Now, as an adult, I love returning the favor and always think about giving out larger than average candy and chocolate. But not this year,…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/11/01
What a weird morning. Totally forgot the the time changed, the clock moving back an hour (i.e. we gain an hour), and found myself studying and working at 03:30 AM (instead of 04:30 AM). When I first woke up and glanced at my Casio watch, I debated whether to get out of bed or not…
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Five tips for surviving (or thriving) in the OMSCS program as a computer science graduate student
Overview In this post, I’m sharing five tips that I’ve picked up over the last 2 years in the program. At the time of this writing, I’m wrapping up my 7th course (advanced operating systems) in the OMSCS program. This means that I have 3 more courses to complete until I graduate with my masters…
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Distributed Shared Memory (Part 2 of 2) Notes
An example Summary Key Words: Conditional variable, pthread_signal, pthread_wait in the concrete example (screenshot below), P1 instructions that update memory (e.g. flag = 1) can be run in parallel with that of P2 because of release consistency model Advantage of RC over SC Summary In a nutshell, we gain performance in a shared memory…
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Distributed Shared Memory (Part 1 of 2) Notes
Introduction Summary Main question is this: can we make a cluster look like a shared memory machine Cluster as a parallel machine (sequential program) Summary One strategy is to not write explicit parallel programs and instead use language assisted features (like pragma) that signal to the compiler that this section be optimized. But, there are…
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Global memory systems (part 1 of 2) notes
Introduction Summary Lessons will be broken down into three modules: GMS (i.e. can we use peer memory for paging across LAN) and DSM (i.e. can we make the cluster appear as a shared memory machine) and DFS (i.e. can we use cluster memory for cooperative caching of files) Context for Global Memory Systems Summary Key…
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Daily Review: Day Ending in 2020/10/21
Work Defined a data specification (in the form of a protobuf definition) that’ll be used to help drive the conversation between us and our customer. Our customer (AWS Networking) will be vending us data but its unclear (at the moment) what data they will be providing not only to us but to other teams. So…
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Distributed Systems – Active Networks (notes)
Introduction Summary How do quickly and reliably route data Routing on the Internet Summary Key Words: active network The idea is that instead of each router performing a simple next hop look up, let’s make the routers smart and inject code in the packet that can influence the flow. How can we do this securely…
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Daily Review: Day Ending in 2020/10/18
Family and Friends Celebrated Elliott’s 1 year birthday. Jess and I are two weeks late but to be fair, the two of us were in the midst of moving the entire house, making it difficult to celebrate properly. And now that we moved in — but not quite fully unpacked — it’s easy to let…
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How to clean your cleaning tools (notes)
How do you take care of the tools that you use for cleaning? This is a question I’ve been curious about over the last couple days since currently going through a cleaning phase. To up my cleaning skills, I’ve been searching online for tutorials and discovered an amazing YouTube channel called Clean My Space that…
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Daily Review: Day Ending in 2020/10/17
Family Went on a cleaning binge. Not sure why sometimes I get totally obsessed with cleaning but yesterday was one of those spurts. I had watched about a dozen YouTube videos (from Clean My Space) on cleaning tutorials, followed by vigorouly scrubbing down stove tops with baking soda and vinegar, buying cleaning supplies (e.g. micro…