A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a unique digital certificate stored on a blockchain. Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (which are “fungible,” meaning one Bitcoin is identical to another), every NFT has a unique identifier that distinguishes it from all others. Think of it like a signed baseball card or a deed to a house. You can…
Double-blind peer review is a standard evaluation process used by many academic conferences and journals, particularly in computer science. Understanding how it works is essential before submitting your paper. What is Double-Blind Review? Double-blind review means that reviewers and authors remain anonymous to each other throughout the evaluation process. Neither party knows the identity of…
When should the authors anonymize themselves in a paper submitted to a conference for review? Several general concepts: Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people of similar competence to the producers of the work (peers). — Wikipedia Single-blind describes experiments where information that could introduce bias or otherwise skew the…
Writing effective paper reviews is essential work in academic fields like information retrieval, machine learning, systems research, and most technical disciplines. Whether you’re reviewing for a conference, journal, or internal research group, the goal is the same: provide constructive, specific feedback that helps authors improve their work and helps decision-makers assess contribution. What Makes a…
Facebook operates two distinct caching systems, each designed for different access patterns and consistency requirements. Memcache serves as a lookaside cache where the intelligence resides primarily on the client side. This architecture means applications are responsible for cache invalidation, consistency checks, and determining what data to cache. Memcache is stateless and horizontally scalable, making it…
Consistency models define the guarantees that a distributed system makes about the order and visibility of data modifications across nodes. Understanding these models is essential when designing systems, choosing databases, or debugging data anomalies in production. Strong Consistency Models Strict Consistency is the ideal but rarely achievable model. It guarantees that reads always reflect the…
If you’re creating posters—whether for conferences, events, or general communication—you’ll want the right tools and guidance. Here’s a practical breakdown of what works. Design Software Inkscape is your go-to for vector-based design. It’s free, open-source, and handles logos, text, and scalable graphics without quality loss. Use it when you need clean lines, precise shapes, or…
When you’re fighting page limits — conference submissions, journal requirements, or just fitting content on a poster — reducing LaTeX’s default spacing is essential. Here are the practical approaches, from gentle to aggressive. Basic Spacing Adjustments Start with the most impactful changes. These target the whitespace around floats (figures, tables) and captions: \setlength{\textfloatsep}{1pt} % Space…
Most popular task monitoring tools (top, iotop, procfs) sample disk I/O information at granularity limited by kernel timer frequency—typically once per second. This sampling rate misses short-lived I/O bursts and makes it difficult to accurately measure which tasks are truly I/O bound. eBPF and kernel tracepoints let you capture microsecond-level accuracy without heavy overhead. Why…
Jeff Dean’s “Designs, Lessons and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems” is essential reading for anyone building or operating distributed infrastructure. This talk, presented at multiple conferences including LADIS and various tech events, distills decades of experience at Google and now at Google Research. If you’re designing systems that scale beyond a single machine, you…
Cosmos is Microsoft’s internal petabyte-scale distributed data storage and query system, built to handle massive analytical workloads across their infrastructure. While Microsoft hasn’t published formal technical papers on Cosmos, information has surfaced through conference talks and engineering blogs over the years. Architecture and Scale Cosmos operates at truly massive scale: Storage capacity: Approximately 62 physical…
Historical Archive: This post lists conferences from 2012. The submission deadlines and venues are no longer current. For up-to-date conference information, check the official conference websites or resources like Conference Alert and CCF Deadlines. I am trying to find out the top conferences that have the largest average number of citations in the last 5…
Hadoop 1.x reached end-of-life in 2014 and is no longer maintained. This post documents a deprecated architecture for historical reference only. For new deployments, use Hadoop 3.x+ with YARN, which offers significant improvements in resource management, multi-tenancy, and reliability. See the Apache Hadoop documentation for current versions. For managed services, consider AWS EMR, Google Dataproc,…
Understanding distributed systems and cloud computing starts with the literature. These papers form the foundation for anyone working in the space — they’re not just historical artifacts, they’re still actively referenced and their design principles remain relevant. Internet-Scale Systems and Datacenters The Google cluster architecture paper remains essential reading. It laid out the practical realities…
Historical Archive: This post lists conferences from 2012. The submission deadlines and venues are no longer current. For up-to-date conference information, check the official conference websites or resources like Conference Alert and CCF Deadlines. This post lists important conferences related to Cloud Computing in year 2013. SOSP 2013 SOSP’13: The 24th ACM Symposium on Operating…
Historical Archive: This post lists conferences from 2011. The submission deadlines and venues are no longer current. For up-to-date conference information, check the official conference websites or resources like Conference Alert and CCF Deadlines. This post lists important conferences on Cloud Computing in year 2012. OSDI 2012 10th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and…
Archived Content (2010): This post describes a research project from 2010. The tools and versions mentioned (Hadoop 0.20, MapReduce Streaming) are historically significant but have been largely superseded by modern distributed build systems like Bazel Remote Execution and cloud-native CI/CD pipelines. mrcc – A Distributed C Compiler System on MapReduce Original Project Date: January 2010…