http://queue.acm.org/listing.cfm?item_topic=Distributed Computing&qc_type=topics_list&filter=Distributed Computing&page_title=Distributed Computing&order=desc http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3264508 Over one-fourth of Googlers use internal, data-center-hosted virtual desktops. This on-premises offering sits in the corporate network and allows users to develop code, access internal resources, and use GUI tools remotely from anywhere in the world. Among its most notable features, a virtual desktop instance can be sized according to the task at hand, has persistent user storage, and can be moved between corporate data centers to follow traveling Googlers. Until recently, our virtual desktops were hosted on commercially available hardware on Google's corporate network using a homegrown open-source virtual cluster-management system called Ganeti. Today, this substantial and Google-critical workload runs on GCP (Google Compute Platform). This article discusses the reasons for the move to GCP, and how the migration was accomplished. Distributed Computing Wed, 01 Aug 2018 15:07:48 GMT Matt Fata, Philippe-Joseph Arida, Patrick Hahn, Betsy Beyer 3264508 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3215876 Clearly, your management has never heard the phrase, "You get what you pay for." Or perhaps they heard it and didn't realize it applied to them. The savings in cloud computing comes at the expense of a loss of control over your systems, which is summed up best in the popular nerd sticker that says, "The Cloud is Just Other People's Computers." Some providers now have something called Metal-as-a-Service, which I really think ought to mean that an '80s metal band shows up at your office, plays a gig, smashes the furniture, and urinates on the carpet, but alas, it's just the cloud providers' way of finally admitting that cloud computing isn't really the right answer for all applications. For systems that require deterministic performance guarantees to work well, you really have to think very hard about whether or not a cloud-based system is the right answer, because providing deterministic guarantees requires quite a bit of control over the variables in the environment. Cloud systems are not about giving you control; they're about the owner of the systems having the control. Distributed Computing Mon, 07 May 2018 14:49:52 GMT George Neville-Neil 3215876 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3207170 That a system can randomly jam doesn't just indicate a serious bug in the system; it is also a major source of risk. You don't say what your distributed job-control system controls, but let's just say I hope it's not something with significant, real-world side effects, like a power station, jet aircraft, or financial trading system. The risk, of course, is that the system will jam, not when it's convenient for someone to add a dummy job to clear the jam, but during some operation that could cause data loss or return incorrect results. I rather suspect that having a system like this jam while coordinating, for example, the balancing of electrical power across a power grid would have spectacular and perhaps fatal results. Distributed Computing Tue, 10 Apr 2018 14:09:54 GMT George Neville-Neil 3207170 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3025012 This article explores and names some of the practical approaches used in the implementation of large-scale mission-critical applications in a world that rejects distributed transactions. Topics include the management of fine-grained pieces of application data that may be repartitioned over time as the application grows. Design patterns support sending messages between these repartitionable pieces of data. Distributed Computing Mon, 12 Dec 2016 13:41:04 GMT Pat Helland 3025012 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2953944 If you squint hard enough, many of the challenges of distributed computing appear similar to the work done by the great physicists. Dang, those fellows were smart! Here, we examine some of the most important physics breakthroughs and draw some whimsical parallels to phenomena in the world of computing... just for fun. Distributed Computing Tue, 07 Jun 2016 13:19:56 GMT Pat Helland 2953944 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2940294 Distributed systems pose unique challenges for software developers. Reasoning about concurrent activities of system nodes and even understanding the system's communication topology can be difficult. A standard approach to gaining insight into system activity is to analyze system logs. Unfortunately, this can be a tedious and complex process. This article looks at several key features and debugging challenges that differentiate distributed systems from other kinds of software. The article presents several promising tools and ongoing research to help resolve these challenges. Distributed Computing Wed, 18 May 2016 15:12:06 GMT Ivan Beschastnikh, Patty Wang, Yuriy Brun, Michael D, Ernst 2940294 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2933408 It is accepted wisdom that when the data you wish to move into the cloud is at terabyte scale and beyond, you are better off shipping it to the cloud provider, rather than uploading it. This article takes an analytical look at how shipping and uploading strategies compare, the various factors on which they depend, and under what circumstances you are better off shipping rather than uploading data, and vice versa. Such an analytical determination is important to make, given the increasing availability of gigabit-speed Internet connections, along with the explosive growth in data-transfer speeds supported by newer editions of drive interfaces such as SAS and PCI Express. As this article reveals, the aforementioned "accepted wisdom" does not always hold true, and there are well-reasoned, practical recommendations for uploading versus shipping data to the cloud. Distributed Computing Tue, 03 May 2016 15:35:47 GMT Sachin Date 2933408 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2878574 One of the more surprising things about digital systems - and, in particular, modern computers - is how poorly they keep time. When most programs ran on a single system this was not a significant issue for the majority of software developers, but once software moved into the distributed-systems realm this inaccuracy became a significant challenge. Few programmers have read the most important paper in this area, Leslie Lamport's "Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System" (1978), and only a few more have come to appreciate the problems they face once they move into the world of distributed systems. Distributed Computing Tue, 12 Jan 2016 17:07:22 GMT George Neville-Neil 2878574 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2770868 Virtually all systems have some requirements for latency, defined here as the time required for a system to respond to input. Latency requirements appear in problem domains as diverse as aircraft flight controls, voice communications, multiplayer gaming, online advertising, and scientific experiments. Distributed systems present special latency considerations. In recent years the automation of financial trading has driven requirements for distributed systems with challenging latency requirements and global geographic distribution. Automated trading provides a window into the engineering challenges of ever-shrinking latency requirements, which may be useful to software engineers in other fields. Distributed Computing Mon, 04 May 2015 09:39:51 GMT Andrew Brook 2770868 http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2756508 By now everyone has heard of cloud computing and realized that it is changing how both traditional enterprise IT and emerging startups are building solutions for the future. Is this trend toward the cloud just a shift in the complicated economics of the hardware and software industry, or is it a fundamentally different way of thinking about computing? Having worked in the industry, I can confidently say it is both. Distributed Computing Thu, 09 Apr 2015 14:39:53 GMT Daniel C. Wang 2756508