EuroSys 2012 was last week - one of the premier European systems conferences. Over at the Cambridge System Research Group’s blog, various people from the group have written notes on the papers presented. They’re very well-written summaries, and worth checking out for an overview of the research presented.
FLP and CAP aren't the same thing
An interesting question came up on Quora this last week. Roughly speaking, the question asked how, if at all, the FLP theorem and the CAP theorem were related. I’d thought idly about exactly the same question myself before. Both theorems concern the impossibility of solving fairly similar fundamental distributed systems problems in what appear to be fairly similar distributed systems settings. The CAP theorem gets all the airtime, but FLP to me is a more beautiful result. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if both theorems turned out to be equivalent; that is effectively restatements of each other?
[Read More]Should I take a systems reading course?
A smart student asked me a couple of days ago whether I thought taking a 2xx-level reading course in operating systems was a good idea. The student, understandably, was unsure whether talking about these systems was as valuable as actually building them, and also whether, since his primary interest is in ‘distributed’ systems, he stood to benefit from a deep understanding of things like virtual memory.
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