Tag: sysarch


High Scalability – High Scalability – 42 Monster Problems that Attack as Loads Increase

This is a look at all the bad things that can happen to your carefully crafted program as loads increase: all hell breaks lose. Sure, you can scale out or scale up, but you can also choose to program better. Make your system handle larger loads. This saves money because fewer boxes are needed and it will make the entire application more reliable and have better response times. And it can be quite satisfying as a programmer.


High Scalability – Zen and the Art of Scaling – A Koan and Epigram Approach

Russell (AKA Jak Sprats) has been pondering, considering, and implementing distributed databases for many years. In a recent email conversation he shared 44 of the lessons he has learned from developing the infrastructure for high performance / highly scalable systems. Some are well known, some are debatable, and some obviously result from a deep experience that is worth learning from:


decac – A higher-level assembly language – Google Project Hosting

Deca is a language designed to provide the advanced features of sophisticated, high-level programming languages while still programming as close as possible to the bare metal. It brings in the functional, object-oriented, and generic programming paradigms without requiring a garbage collector or a threading system, so programmers really only pay in performance for the features they use.


CiteSeerX — Software Engineering with Formal Methods: The Development of a Storm Surge Barrier Control System – Revisiting Seven Myths of Formal Methods

This paper discusses the use of formal methods in the development of the control system for the Maeslant Kering. The Maeslant Kering is the movable dam which has to protect Rotterdam from floodings while, at (almost) the same time, not restricting ship traffic to the port of Rotterdam. The control system, called BOS, completely autonomously decides about closing and opening of the barrier and, when necessary, also performs these tasks without human intervention.


A Gentle Introduction to Gearman and its Concepts

Gearman (an anagram for “Manager”) is a system for farming out work units to several different servers (or several processes on one server), allowing the calling code to do something completely different while the task is performed. Gearman is not intended for inter-process communication, but is a way to tell other processes that there are work available, and letting these processes (called workers) grab a piece of work for themselves.


Nati Shalom’s Blog: Real Time analytics for Big Data: Facebook’s New Realtime Analytics System

This will lead to an architecture for building your own Realtime Time Analytics for Big-Data that might be easier to implement, using Facebook’s experience as a starting point and guide as well as the experience gathered through a recent work with few of GigaSpaces customers. The second post provide a summary of that new approach as well as a pattern and a demo for building your own Real Time Analytics system


Introduction

In the context of scalability a good analogy to software system is an enterprise. Assume that you need to design workrooms and production processes that will allow lots of personnel to work efficiently (read concurrently). Will you require all tasks to pass via a single man (logging)? How many toilets you need, and how will you place them (memory management)? Do you want to maintain certain ratio between programmers, testers and managers, or you will leave it to chance (various stages of processing)? The principles are all the same – excessive communications, dependencies, waits and centralization kill concurrency.


Piccolo Distributed Computing Framework

Piccolo is a framework designed to make it easy to develop efficient distributed applications.

In contrast to traditional data-centric models (such as Hadoop) which present the user a single object at a time to operate on, Piccolo exposes a global table interface which is available to all parts of the computation simulataneously. This allows users to specify programs in an intuitive manner very similar to that of writing programs for a single machine.


B2B Applications for REST’s Uniform Contract constraint

Instead of defining a service contract in terms of special purpose methods and parameter lists only understood by that particular service, we want to build up a service contract that leverages methods and media types that are abstracted away from any specific business context. REST-compliant service contracts are defined as collections of lightweight unique “resource” endpoints that express the service’s unique capabilities through these uniform methods and media types.


Writing a PHP daemon application – Simas Toleikis

There is a special group of applications that require a different PHP script execution model. For example:

* A chat server (or any other kind of socket server therefore)
* A HTML5 WebSocket server
* A web crawler, data harvester or any other real-time service

All of the mentioned applications need to be run in the background as daemons – something that PHP was never designed/supposed to be good at. The plain C language is a weapon of choice when it comes to writing a daemon implementation, but then again, if the application in question does not depend on high performance and concurrency – PHP can do the job quite well.

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