Cornell Systems Lunch

CS 7490 Spring 2023
Friday 11:30AM, Gates 114

Lorenzo Alvisi and Robbert van Renesse


The Systems Lunch is a seminar for discussing recent, interesting papers in the systems area, broadly defined to span operating systems, distributed systems, networking, architecture, databases, and programming languages. The goal is to foster technical discussions among the Cornell systems research community. We meet once a week on Fridays at 11:30 AM Gates 114.

The systems lunch is open to all Cornell Ph.D. students interested in systems. First-year graduate students are especially welcome. Non-Ph.D. students have to obtain permission from the instructor. Student participants are expected to sign up for CS 7490, Systems Research Seminar, for one credit.

To join the systems lunch mailing list please send an empty message to cs-systems-lunch-l-request@cornell.edu with the subject line "join". More detailed instructions can be found here.

Links to papers and abstracts below are unlikely to work outside the Cornell CS firewall. If you have trouble viewing them, this is the likely cause.

The Zoom link is https://cornell.zoom.us/j/96859053610?pwd=TjRvck9sZklqQjFoQmdDazNuYm5Tdz09.

Date Paper Presenter
January 27 BeeGees: stayin' alive in chained BFT
Abstract: Modern chained Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) systems leverage a combination of pipelining and leader rotation to obtain both efficiency and fairness. These protocols, however, require a sequence of three or four consecutive honest leaders to commit operations. Therefore, even simple leader failures such as crashes can weaken liveness both theoretically and practically. Obtaining a chained BFT protocol that reaches decisions even if the sequence of honest leaders is non-consecutive, remains an open question. To resolve this question we present BeeGees, a novel chained BFT protocol that successfully commits blocks even with non-consecutive honest leaders. It does this while also maintaining quadratic word complexity with threshold signatures, linear word complexity with SNARKs, and responsiveness between consecutive honest leaders. BeeGees reduces the expected commit latency of HotStuff by a factor of three under failures, and the worst-case latency by a factor of seven.
Bio: Neil Giridharan is a third year PhD student advised by Natacha Crooks studying distributed systems with a focus on BFT consensus protocol
Neil Giridharan (Berkeley)
February 3 Cancelled

 
February 10 Carat Cake: replacing paging via compiler/kernel cooperation
Brian Suchy et al., Northwestern University
ASPLOS 2022
Drew Zagieboylo
February 17 IBM Research and Hybrid Multicloud
Dr. Andrew Anderson and Dr. Braulio Dumba, IBM Research
NOTE: meeting will be at 2pm in Gates 114. This lecture will provide an overview of IBM Research cutting-edge work in the areas of hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and core sciences. The discussion will highlight IBM Research efforts to develop and integrate these technologies to solve real-world problems and shape the future of computing.
A. Anderson and B. Dumba (IBM)
February 24

 
March 3

 
March 10

 
March 17

 
March 24

 
March 31

 
April 7 Spring Break, no meeting.
April 14

 
April 21

Jon Howell (VMware)
April 28

 
May 5