SOSP 2009, Day Three

Final day here at SOSP 2009. Unfortunately my shuttle back to the airport leaves in the middle of the first session, so I am only able to go to the first couple of talks.

Last night at the SIGOPS business meeting, Doug Terry gave an overview of SIGOPS' finances; apparently they are making money hand over fist, and are actually looking for ways to spend down some of the savings. My suggestion: host SOSP 2011 in the ideal location for the conference and don't worry about breaking even.

Speaking of SOSP 2011, Peter Druschel was announced as the Program Chair. There were a few proposals for sites to host the conference. The one that received the most applause was Madeira Island, which is some 500 miles off the coast of Portugal. The site looks fantastic, though I'm not sure about travel connections. Lisbon was the other Portuguese option, which looks great. There were proposals for Dresden, China, Brazil, New Hampshire, and Puerto Rico as well.

The rest of the business meeting included discussions of ACM's copyright policy (and whether SIGOPS should put pressure on them to change it to permit more open distribution of papers); a rehashing of the old single-blind-vs-double-blind controversy (thankfully short); and some discussion of whether the SIGOPS Hall of Fame award should be opened up to non-peer-reviewed publications (there was widespread support for this).

The only talk I have time to write up today is...

Distributed Aggregation for Data-Parallel Computing: Interfaces and Implementations

This paper deals with data-parallel computation in clusters, popularized by systems such as MapReduce and Hadoop. Microsoft's DryadLINQ system automatically generates distributed queries on clusters from application code (e.g., in C#). In this paper, the authors explore programming interfaces to enable distributed aggregation within the cluster: rather than the conventional two-phase "map-reduce" paradigm, allowing intermediate aggregation at source nodes and within intermediate nodes. Doing so can greatly reduce disk and network I/O. The talk emphasized that the programming interface for defining iterator functions can have a substantial impact on performance, and the authors have experimented with a range of aggregation and pipelining strategies.

I have to run to the airport, so I don't have time to write up the Quincy presentation in detail, but kudos to the authors for the Zero Punctuation-themed talk. I'm bummed that I have to miss the UpRight talk as well as the entire last session.