‘Links’
Interesting Links Dec 2011
Saturday, December 31st, 2011
Hardware
- Intel managing to squeeze 50 cores on a single chip, breaking through the teraflop boundary as they do so: Brier Dudley’s Blog | Wow: Intel unveils 1 teraflop chip with 50-plus cores | Seattle Times Newspaper
- RISC architectures have had a renaissance thanks largely to the needs of the mobile sector, could their low power consumption make them a serious contender for enterprise space? x86 Faces Unexpected RISC Competition
- AMD announce 4 memory channels allowing massive addressable spaces up to 364GB per CMP : AMD’s Interlagos and Valencia finally emerge
- Anyone who follows my blog will know of my belief in large address spaces reshaping the landscape, certainly for enterprise applications. This articles echoes these views: Megatrend: Cheap RAM Reshaping All of Computing | Dr Dobb’s
FPGA
- IBM’s Lime is an interesting approach to simplifying the programming of secondary devices. See Lime paper and the related Liquid Metal project.
- JVM on FPGA: JOP: A Tiny Java Processor Core for FPGA
- An interesting paper on using FPGA for Monte Carlo Simulation: FPGA for monte carlos
High Performance Java
- An excellent talk about using memory efficiently in Java applications, that the costs are often higher than we think. It includes clear descriptions of the footprint of all Java objects and utilities : Building Memory Efficient Java Applications
- There has been a flurry of activity coming from Azul Systems recently. Most notably the release of Zing, their pauseless garbage collector. Gene Til’s talk about the State of the Art in GC from QCon SF 2011 is one of the best I’ve seen (QConSF 2011: State of the Art in Garbage Collection).
- Azul have also recently released JHiccup. An interesting utility that measures operating system stalls. Java Developer Tools: jHiccup Java Performance Analysis
- Charles Nutter’s comments on his favourite JVM flags including my favourite (-XX:+PrintOptoAssembly): Headius: My Favorite Hotspot JVM Flags
Distributed Data Storage
- A great paper from VLDB describing an approach for balancing replication and partitioning, something close to my own heart: Schism: a Workload-Driven Approach to Database Replication and Partitioning
- Hasso Plattner (the P is SAP) wrote this paper which provides an insigntful view of where he believes the field should be going (and of course SAP’s solution Hana): Hasso Plattner on In-Memory OLAP & OLTP
- I enjoyed watching this talk about Mongo: InfoQ: Scaling with MongoDB
Interesting:
- An entertaining article from the Economist about David Gelernter’s predictions of the future of computing: Brain scan: Seer of the mirror world | The Economist
- Could Prezi really dislodge PowerPoint? Prezi
- Double Loop Learning – a different view on organizational learning. Chris Argyris.
- Worth reading if you are not familiar with the idea already: CQRS
- An interesting twist on the traditional storyboard approach Our Story Board is Better Than Yours… I’m a big fan of replacing estimation with uniformly sized stories.
- Booked your next holiday? What about a Code Retreat with Corey Haines
Interesting Links Oct 2011
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
High Performance Java
- Not exactly lightweight reading but one of the most detailed and influential papers on tuning your software for processing efficiency: What Developers Should Understand About Memory
- If you read the above and want to put some of it into action then VTune should be your next port of call. Diagnostic software for CPU cache hits etc: VTune™ Amplifier XE 2011 from Intel – Intel® Software Network
- When it really won’t go any faster, look at the Assembler: Deep dive into assembly code from Java | Java.net
- In anticipation of G1 (in case they ever get it finished) here’s the original paper with anticipated performance figures: G1 paper with figures
- A different approach to GC using processor specific minor collections (in Haskell): Multicore Garbage Collection with Local Heaps
Distributed Data Storage:
- The new Oracle NoSQL database – this is the best article I’ve read summarising it’s position in the market: DBMS Musings: Overview of the Oracle NoSQL Database
- The official Oracle NoSQL Whitepaper: Oracle NoSQL Database White Paper
- An interesting approach to data storage: an FPGA based data warehouse: FPGA Data Warehouse
- Google’s interesting SQL wrapped MapReduce framework: Tenzing A SQL Implementation On The MapReduce Framework
Distributed Computing:
- The Actors Model – just in case you’re not familiar with it: Actors model for distribution
- Gluster – an open source distributed file system: Gluster
- Running Cuda natively on x86 processors: Running CUDA Code Natively on x86 Processors | Dr Dobb’s Journal
Coherence related:
- Thinking about using 64bit JVMs with compressed pointers : 32-bit or 64-bit JVM? How about a Hybrid?
- Using different caches for read and write. A sensible pattern for Cohernece implementation: Alexey Ragozin’s Blog
- OCZ Z-Drive – an interesting and competitively priced alternative to FusionIO:
Just Interesting:
- The architecture of the transputer. An interesting reflection on a couple of Bristol’s finest exports (other than Portishead): the Transputer and the Occum programming language. David May, parallel processing pioneer • reghardware
- Is your brain like an Iphone? Is Your Brain Like an iPhone? Which App is Running Now? – Novato, CA Patch
- Just be still for once: No Shame in Stillness « Under the Apricot Tree
- Of the huge amount of writing about Steve Jobs I thought the Economist’s coverage was the best: Steve Jobs: The magician | The Economist
- Scott Marcar’s thought prevoking dialog on technology through a financial crisis: The Long Haul: Scott Marcar Leads RBS’ Tech Team Through the Financial Crisis- WatersTechnology.com
- Short but thought provoking article on company culture: Why You Should Question Your Culture – Ron Ashkenas – Harvard Business Review
Interesting Links July 2011
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
Because the future will inevitably be in-memory databases:
- SAP (slightly weirdly) is leading the way with Hana
- SSD makes a new kind of database possible
- The move away from clusters is not restricted to the enterprise
- More drinking of the Hana Kool-Aid
- Fusion IO
- Phase Change Memory breakthrough at IBM
Other interesting stuff:
- Interesting retrospective on computing giants of the past and future (in typical Economist style)
- A mathematician’s lament
- The next generation of Map Reduce
- Where google may be going wrong
Interesting Links Feb 2011
Sunday, February 20th, 2011
Thinking local:
- Nice talk covering optimising code in a single JVM: LMAX
- Biased locking in Hotspot: biased_locking_in_hotspot
- Good overview of caching: intel-cpu-caches
- Good overview of lock free algorithms: lock-free-algorithms
Thinking Distributed:
- Nice overview of the key NoSQL players: cassandra-vs-mongodb-vs-couchdb-vs-redis
- Google’s layering of ACID over BigTable (at least ACID inside a partition):
- Original paper: CIDR11_Paper32.pdf
- Summary thereof: GoogleMegastoreTheDataEngineBehindGAE
- Commentary: comparing-google-megastore
- Commentary: a-interesting-note-on-google-megastore-cap
- Typically Economist: economist.com
Interesting Links Dec 2010
Monday, January 3rd, 2011
More discussions on the move to in memory storage:
- RAM is my friend
- LMAX – How to Do 100K TPS at Less than 1ms Latency
- The problems with ACID, and how to fix them without going NoSQL
- Basho Riak: An Open Source Scalable Data Store
- Facebook’s belief in HBase
- Numbers Everyone Should Know
- Google Dremel Paper
- Facebook’s New Year Performance Stats
