News from last year. Aug. 26, 2013 11:52 a.m. ET A glitch in time synchronization caused German exchange operator Deutsche BoerseAG DB1.XE -0.16% ‘s Eurex Exchange arm to halt trading for slightly more than an hour early Monday, the latest
Fischer Lynch Patterson and timeouts
There is a widely cited (over 1400 cites in CiteseerX ) result called the Fischer-Lynch-Patterson theorem about consensus – a key issue in distributed databases or any system where data is either distributed or replicated or both. In this paper, we
Why is clock synchronization so important in big data
Distributed transactions have historically been implemented by the database community in the manner pioneered by the architects of System R* [22] in the 1980s. The primary mechanism by which System R*-style distributed transactions impede throughput and extend latency is the requirement of an
Patents considered harmful, by some.
@vyodaiken This makes no sense. You don’t foster competition by handing out monopolies. — Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) September 16, 2014 That’s not how it looks from here but I think part of the muddiness in the software patent argument
A claimed validated operating system.
The claim: we have demonstrated the comprehensive formal verification of the seL4 microkernel, with a complete proof chain from precise, formal statements of high-level security and safety properties to the binary executable code. GD The L4 base is useful –
Cassandra
Cassandra is quite interesting – and time sync seems increasingly critical to correct operation. Here are some resources: A paper on the storage model from developers at Facebook. A reasonably clear introduction from IBM Developer Works. A big difficulty for
A hard theorem becomes easy over time.
The basic result of the incompleteness proofs is pretty simple. The proofs are complicated because the idea was literally unthinkable until programming was invented. The heroic efforts of Gödel, Skolem, Post, and Church to create a mathematics in which doing mathematics