I attended the AWS re:Invent at Las Vegas the week after Thanksgiving. It was a great week there, learning AWS technologies while also having fun. The keynotes given by Andy Jassy and Werner Vogels were always exciting: they covered important new services that were launched during this event. Other sessions shared best practices in using AWS services and infrastructure. They also had music bands playing live music at the site and provided great lunches and snacks during the morning and afternoon breaks.

It is surprised to come across several systems/services that happen to built on top of postgreSQL. Here is a quick summary of these. Systems/services Type AWS Redshift data warehousing TimeScale time series database openGauss/GaussDB distributed relational db, by Huawei AWS Redshift: Redshift is a data warehousing service offered by AWS. It is built on postgreSQL, with a new columnar storage engine. The use of columnar storage is expected to provide better query performance and better compression.

Just out of curiosity, I wanted to know how many lines of code for various software that I am interested in (mostly, file systems and key-value stores). ext4 is the newer version for ext2, mainly added with the journaling mechanism to provide data consistency for crashes. The number of codes for ext4 is 5 times more than ext2. f2fs is a new file system that is optimized for flash devices while nova is a new file system that is optimized for persistent memory.

Finally got some time to test out Intel Optane SSD and Samsung ZSSD with SPDK. Once again, I compared performance numbers from SPDK with Linux block device. Here are some numbers. The experiments were run in a Ubuntu14.04 server and we tested 4KiB random read performance. Intel Optane SSD Metric SPDK /dev/nvme1n1 IOPS 150 K 66.1 K slat 0.13 usec 2.8 usec clat 6.2 usec 11.4 usec lat 6.35 usec 14.

Update packages sudo apt-get update Install php7. The default php coming with Ubuntu 14 is 5.5.9 while hotCRP prefers 5.6 and later. Install the software-properties-common package to get the add-apt-repository command. sudo apt-get install software-properties-common Add php7 ppa and do an update sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php sudo apt-get update Install php7 sudo apt-get install php7.2 php7.2-mysql Install other required packages sudo apt-get install git apache2 mysql-server zip poppler-utils sendmail Get hotCRP source code

I got the opportunity to participate in the review process as a program committee member for USENIX ATC 2018. USENIX ATC is a big conference in term of submissions: this year, it received more than 400 complete submissions. To handle such a huge load on reviewing, the chairs had purposedly doubled the number of program committee members to be 70 this year. Still, it requires a careful planning to run the paper reviewing process smoothly.