Blog posts
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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…
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Daily Review: Day Ending in 2020/10/16
Home Maintenance Watched several YouTube videos on mowing grass. I found an awesome YouTube channel called the The Lawn Care Nut. I had been searching around online on good content that will teach me how to maintain and care for my front (and back) yard. Now, although the owner of the YouTube channel tailors most…
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Daily Review: Day Ending in 2020/10/15
Family Difficult time comforting Jess when she’s upset. It’s insane but it’s so easy for me to gently console other people (like friends or even strangers) when they are upset but I find it incredibly difficult to do the same for Jess. The words just don’t come out. It’s difficult to put into words why…
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Project 3 – Snapshotting my understanding (gRPC)
Unfamiliar Technologies Never heard of or used gRPC. According to their website, it’s a high performance open source RPC framework. I’m wondering if this package is used outside of academia. Probably is and probably is actually used within Amazon. What I do know Google Protobuf. Fortunately, I have some experience with Google Protobufs since we…
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Not putting all your eggs in one basket and Daily Review: Day ending in 2020/10/14
Mental Health Best Part(s) of My Day Swinging on the swings with Elliott. She was sitting on my lap, facing my direction, as swung us on the swing back and forth. The entire time she was smiling and when her cold chubby cheeks brushed up against mine, some dad love feelings ran through my body.…
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Daily Review – Day Ending in 2020/10/13
Family Took Elliott shopping at Safeway while Jess took her work call. We picked up some avocados for our morning smoothies and some blackberries and blueberries (side note: why does a palm sized box of blueberries cost $6.00). While paying for our goods, our cashier awkwardly pulled down her mask for Elliott to see her…
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Lamport’s Clocks (notes)
[ez-toc] Introduction Summary Now that we talked about happened before events, we can talk about lamport clocks Lamport’s Logical Clock Summary A logical clock that each process has and that clock monotonically increases as events unfold. For example, if event A happens before event B, then the event A’s clock (or counter value) must be…
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Daily Review – Day Ending in 2020/10/12
Graduate School Wrote up my analysis on the various barrier synchronization algorithms that I implemented. I had to describe the various algorithms (e.g. dissemination barrier, tournament barrier, centralized sense reversal barrier) for the documentation that will accompany our code and experiments as part of Project 2 for advanced operating systems. Finished watching lectures on Active…
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What I learned from writing synchronization barriers
Before starting project 2 (for my advanced operating systems course), I took a snapshot of my understanding of synchronization barriers. In retrospect, I’m glad I took 10 minutes out of my day to jot down what I did (and did not) know because now, I get a clearer pictur eof what I learned. Overall, I…
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Daily Review – Day ending in 2020/10/11
I’m thrilled to be “off call” in about 4.5 hours, no longer tied to my pager and no longer anxious from possibility of waking up to the sound of nasty alarm. Really, the anxiety revolves around the randomness and the unknown of being paged. What’s also variable is the length of these engagements: sometimes the…
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Weekly Review – Week ending in 2020/10/11
I’m shattered. This past week really broke me, the numerous 3:30 AM wake ups and the long operational issues running until 09:30 PM (past the time I’d like to be asleep). To recover from this taxing work week, I’m taking next Thursday and Friday off. Despite the rough week, I’m relieved that my wife and…
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Don’t break the (writing) chain … has been broken
This week, my cumulative “write every day” streak has been broken (almost 2 months of consistent writing every day), thanks to one of the roughest weeks at work. I normally start every day off with some light blogging — even if its for 5 or 10 minutes — but almost every day this week I…
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Super long day & Having good co-workers
In yesterday’s post, I had mentioned that I was paged out of bed at around 03:30 AM because of an operational issue. And for the rest of the day, my mind was fried and I practically looked like a zombie the rest of the day, my word constantly slurred. On top of all that, a…
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Being paged out of bed at 3 AM …
Sadly I didn’t get to start the day off with writing, my morning routine, since my phone paged me out of bed at 3 AM due to an operational issue from work that lasted about about three hours. Because of this, I know that I’ll feel “off” the rest of the day given that I’ve…