17356_2014SP: CS 5412 Cloud Computing Birman,K

An overview of process groups touching on the most important ideas, but without getting very detailed.

A technical discussion of the class called an Address and how Vsync uses it

Vsync was created as a professional-quality solution, and is the third in a series of toolkits and libraries I've built at Cornell and commercially over a 30 year period. The system has a level of polish and ease of use reflecting all of this experience. The rate of bug reports and problems has been astonishingly low, and we attribute this to the experience we've drawn on, and also to the strong type checking and testing tools built into Visual Studio and C#. But while Vsync is as fast as libPaxos, Zookeeper, Cassandra, MongoDB and similar tools, one reality is that a new kind of hardware, RDMA, is game changing. Our forthcoming Derecho system (slated for late 2016) will leverage RDMA and offers stunning speed, but is coded in C++ 17 and our sense is that it simply won't be possible to get that level of speed without a much more challenging software development experience. Thus we recommend learning this style of system design using Vsync and transitioning to Derecho later. The API is very similar, identical in many ways. But if you care mostly about speed, start directly with Derecho.

Vsync is a professional quality tool, but there is no reason for students to fear it. In fact at Cornell, we have used it for many kinds of course projects, very successfully. Moreover, we've put lots of examples of code you can easily adapt for your purposes online and into our tutorials and videos, and there are written materials too (a manual, and documentation for the system calls). You can even do projectrs from some of the suggestions on our projects tab, on the Vsync.codeplex.com web site.

A very broad overview. Concepts covered include client applications ("apps") that talk to a service with multiple servers in it and runs on a cloud, a cluster, or even on your laptop. They do this using standard widely accepted tools, like RESTful RPC or WCF, over TCP, with load-balancing. Inside the group of servers we use Vsync to track group membership, detect and correct for crashes, and to replicate data.