Recent PDL Publications

The PDL Packet - Summer 2023 Newsletter

 

Agents of Autonomy: A Systematic Study of Robotics on Modern Hardware
BEST PAPER SIGMETRICS 2024!

Mohammad Bakhshalipour, Phillip B. Gibbons

2024 ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP PERFORMANCE Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE Abstracts ’24), June 10–14, 2024, Venice, Italy.

As robots increasingly permeate modern society, it is crucial for the system and hardware research community to bridge its longstanding gap with robotics. This divide has persisted due to the lack of (i) a systematic performance evaluation of robotics on different computing platforms and (ii) a comprehensive, open-source, crossplatform benchmark suite. To address these gaps, we present a systematic performance study of robotics on modern hardware and introduce RoWild, an opensource benchmark suite for robotics that is comprehensive and cross-platform. [...more]

 

SIEVE is Simpler than LRU: An Efficient Turn-Key Eviction Algorithm for Web Caches
COMMUNITY AWARD FOR BEST PAPER!

Yazhuo Zhang, Juncheng Yang, Yao Yue, Ymir Vigfusson, K. V. Rashmi

21st USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'24), April 16–18, 2024. Santa Clara, CA.

Caching is an indispensable technique for low-cost and fast data serving. The eviction algorithm, at the heart of a cache, has been primarily designed to maximize efficiency—reducing the cache miss ratio. Many eviction algorithms have been designed in the past decades. However, they all trade off throughput, simplicity, or both for higher efficiency. Such a compromise often hinders adoption in production systems. This work presents SIEVE, an algorithm that is simpler than LRU and provides better than state-of-the-art efficiency and scalability for web cache workloads. [...more]

 

Baleen: ML Admission & Prefetching for Flash Caches

Daniel Lin-Kit Wong, Hao Wu, Carson Molder, Sathya Gunasekar, Jimmy Lu, Snehal Khandkar, Abhinav Sharma, Daniel S. Berger, Nathan Beckmann, Gregory R. Ganger

22nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'24), Feb. 27–29, 2024, Santa Clara, CA.

Flash caches are used to reduce peak backend load for throughput-constrained data center services, reducing the total number of backend servers required. Bulk storage systems are a large-scale example, backed by high-capacity but low-throughput hard disks, and using flash caches to provide a more cost-effective storage layer underlying everything from blobstores to data warehouses. However, flash caches must address the limited write endurance of flash by limiting the long-term average flash write rate to avoid premature wearout. To do so, most flash caches must use admission policies to filter cache insertions and maximize the workload-reduction value of each flash write. The Baleen flash cache uses coordinated ML admission and prefetching to reduce peak backend load. [...more]

 

Dear User-Defined Functions, Inlining isn’t working out so great for us. Let’s try batching to make our relationship work. Sincerely, SQL

Kai Franz, Samuel Arch, Denis Hirn, Torsten Grust, Todd C. Mowry, Andrew Pavlo

Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR 2024), Chaminade, CA, USA, January 14-17, 2024

SQL’s user-defined functions (UDFs) allow developers to express complex computation using procedural logic. But UDFs have been the bane of database management systems (DBMSs) for decades because they inhibit optimization opportunities, potentially slowing down queries significantly. In response, batching and inlining techniques have been proposed to enable effective query optimization of UDF calls within SQL. Inlining is now available in a major commercial DBMS. But the trade-offs between both approaches on modern DBMSs remain unclear. [...more]