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  1. Many database applications execute transactions under a weaker isolation level, such as READ COMMITTED. This often leads to concurrency bugs that look like race conditions in multi-threaded programs. While this problem is well known, philosophies of how to address this problem vary a lot, ranging from making a SERIALIZABLE database faster to living with weaker isolation and the consequence of concurrency bugs. This paper studies the consequences, root causes, and how developers fix 93 real-world concurrency bugs in database applications. We observe that, on the one hand, developers still prefer preventing these bugs from happening. On the other hand, database systems are not providing sufficient support for this task, so developers often fix these bugs using ad-hoc solutions, which are often complicated and not fully correct. We further discuss research opportunities to improve concurrency control in database implementations. 
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  2. Database applications frequently use weaker isolation levels, such as Read Committed, for better performance, which may lead to bugs that do not happen under Serializable. Although a number of works have proposed methods to identify such isolation-related bugs, the difficulty of analyzing reported bugs is often underestimated, since these bugs often involve multiple complicated transactions interleaved in a specific order and they often require users' feedback to improve the accuracy of bug analysis. This paper presents IsoBugView, a tool to visualize isolation bugs and incorporate users' feedback: to address the challenge that a complicated bug may include much information and thus is hard to present, IsoBugView displays a high-level overview of the bug first and displays further information of individual pieces if the developer needs further investigation. To incorporate users' feedback, IsoBugView embeds hook functions into the backend analysis tool to preprocess a dependency graph and postprocess a found cycle and further allows a user to apply predefined hook functions in its graphic user interface. Our experience shows that IsoBugView has greatly improved our productivity of analyzing isolation bugs. 
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  3. null (Ed.)
    The physical data layout significantly impacts performance when database systems access cold data. In addition to the traditional row store and column store designs, recent research proposes to partition tables hierarchically, starting from either horizontal or vertical partitions and then determining the best partitioning strategy on the other dimension independently for each partition. All these partitioning strategies naturally produce rectangular partitions. Coarse-grained rectangular partitioning reads unnecessary data when a table cannot be partitioned along one dimension for all queries. Fine-grained rectangular partitioning produces many small partitions which negatively impacts I/O performance and possibly introduces a high tuple reconstruction overhead. This paper introduces Jigsaw, a system that employs a novel partitioning strategy that creates partitions with arbitrary shapes, which we refer to as irregular partitions. The traditional tuple-at-a-time or operator-at-a-time query processing models cannot fully leverage the advantages of irregular partitioning, because they may repeatedly read a partition due to its irregular shape. Jigsaw introduces a partition-at-a-time evaluation strategy to avoid repeated accesses to an irregular partition. We implement and evaluate Jigsaw on the HAP and TPC-H benchmarks and find that irregular partitioning is up to 4.2× faster than a columnar layout for moderately selective queries. Compared with the columnar layout, irregular partitioning only transfers 21% of the data to complete the same query. 
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  4. null (Ed.)
    Networkswith Remote DirectMemoryAccess (RDMA) support are becoming increasingly common. RDMA, however, offers a limited programming interface to remote memory that consists of read, write and atomic operations. With RDMA alone, completing the most basic operations on remote data structures often requires multiple round-trips over the network. Data-intensive systems strongly desire higher-level communication abstractions that supportmore complex interaction patterns. A natural candidate to consider is MPI, the de facto standard for developing high-performance applications in the HPC community. This paper critically evaluates the communication primitives of MPI and shows that using MPI in the context of a data processing system comes with its own set of insurmountable challenges. Based on this analysis, we propose a new communication abstraction named RDMO, or Remote DirectMemory Operation, that dispatches a short sequence of reads, writes and atomic operations to remote memory and executes them in a single round-trip. 
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  5. null (Ed.)
    RDMA has been an important building block for many high-performance distributed key-value stores in recent prior work. To sustain millions of operations per second per node, many of these works use hashing schemes, such as cuckoo hashing, that guarantee that an existing key can be found in a small, constant number of RDMA operations. In this paper, we explore whether linear probing is a compelling design alternative to cuckoo-based hashing schemes. Instead of reading a fixed number of bytes per RDMA request, this paper introduces a mathematical model that picks the optimal read size by balancing the cost of performing an RDMA operation with the probability of encountering a probe sequence of a certain length. The model can further leverage optimization hints about the location of clusters of keys, which commonly occur in skewed key distributions. We extensively evaluate the performance of linear probing with a variable read size in a modern cluster to understand the trade-offs between cuckoo hashing and linear probing. We find that cuckoo hashing outperforms linear probing only in very highly loaded hash tables (load factors at 90% or higher) that would be prohibitively expensive to maintain in practice. Overall, linear probing with variable-sized reads using our model has up to 2.8× higher throughput than cuckoo hashing, with throughput as high as 50M lookup operations per second per node. 
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  6. null (Ed.)
  7. Many applications are increasingly becoming I/O-bound. To improve scalability, analytical models of parallel I/O performance are often consulted to determine possible I/O optimizations. However, I/O performance modeling has predominantly focused on applications that directly issue I/O requests to a parallel file system or a local storage device. These I/O models are not directly usable by applications that access data through standardized I/O libraries, such as HDF5, FITS, and NetCDF, because a single I/O request to an object can trigger a cascade of I/O operations to different storage blocks. The I/O performance characteristics of applications that rely on these libraries is a complex function of the underlying data storage model, user-configurable parameters and object-level access patterns. As a consequence, I/O optimization is predominantly an ad-hoc process that is performed by application developers, who are often domain scientists with limited desire to delve into nuances of the storage hierarchy of modern computers.This paper presents an analytical cost model to predict the end-to-end execution time of applications that perform I/O through established array management libraries. The paper focuses on the HDF5 and Zarr array libraries, as examples of I/O libraries with radically different storage models: HDF5 stores every object in one file, while Zarr creates multiple files to store different objects. We find that accessing array objects via these I/O libraries introduces new overheads and optimizations. Specifically, in addition to I/O time, it is crucial to model the cost of transforming data to a particular storage layout (memory copy cost), as well as model the benefit of accessing a software cache. We evaluate the model on real applications that process observations (neuroscience) and simulation results (plasma physics). The evaluation on three HPC clusters reveals that I/O accounts for as little as 10% of the execution time in some cases, and hence models that only focus on I/O performance cannot accurately capture the performance of applications that use standard array storage libraries. In parallel experiments, our model correctly predicts the fastest storage library between HDF5 and Zarr 94% of the time, in contrast with 70% of the time for a cutting-edge I/O model. 
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  8. The analysis of massive datasets requires a large number of processors. Prior research has largely assumed that tracking the actual data distribution and the underlying network structure of a cluster, which we collectively refer to as the topology, comes with a high cost and has little practical benefit. As a result, theoretical models, algorithms and systems often assume a uniform topology; however this assumption rarely holds in practice. This necessitates an end-to-end investigation of how one can model, design and deploy topology-aware algorithms for fundamental data processing tasks at large scale. To achieve this goal, we first develop a theoretical parallel model that can jointly capture the cost of computation and communication. Using this model, we explore algorithms with theoretical guarantees for three basic tasks: aggregation, join, and sorting. Finally, we consider the practical aspects of implementing topology-aware algorithms at scale, and show that they have the potential to be orders of magnitude faster than their topology-oblivious counterparts. 
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