Jet lag, a book, research papers, and a dog

I reached Vadodara on the 23rd and was hit with jet lag that lasted about three days.

I’d bought Mira Jacob’s The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing with the hope that it would last me a majority of my visit to India. I read ~100 pages of the book while in the U.S. On my first night in Vadodara I woke up around 3.30am (because of the afore mentioned jet lag) and finished the remaining ~400 pages in four hours. This is an incredible book, and I can see why it was a nominee for Goodreads’ Best Fiction books of 2014. Simply put, I loved it. And yes, I did appreciate the irony of the title given my battle with temporary-time-difference-induced sleeplessness.

With my reading plans in shambles (OK not completely in shambles since I am not yet done with Borges’ Labyrinths which is also amazing) I decided to work on one of my 2014 goals and read some research papers.

Here is what I read:

1. Scaling Memcache at Facebook – This paper talks about how Facebook leveraged memcached to build a distributed key-value store. I thought the usage of UDP for making get requests and flow control mechanisms to combat incast was particularly interesting. Overall this is a very good paper and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in distributed systems and system architecture. My favorite line in the paper? “Simplicity is vital.” (section 9).

1. MultiQueues: Simpler, Faster, and Better Relaxed Concurrent Priority Queues – this paper introduces MultiQueues, a concurrent priority queue with relaxed semantics, i.e. you are not always guaranteed to get a globally minimal item from the data structure. Most of the papers I read are systems papers, so it was refreshing to read a paper that dealt more with data structures. MultiQueues are conceptually quite simple and their performance (as shown in section 6 of the paper) is impressive.

1. You’re Doing It Wrong – this article introduces a B-heap, which is a VM page-friendly implementation of a binary heap. Kamp writes really well, and this article is a joy to read. My main takeaway from this article was the reminder that one should also consider I/O and memory access patterns while analyzing algorithms. This idea was introduced to me in CS-232 at UIUC and it is something that I always try to keep in mind while looking at an algorithm or trying to improve performance.

Oh, and here is the dog!