6.824 Fall 2007 Paper Questions
Please remember to print your answer for each day's paper question on a sheet
of paper and hand it in at the beginning of class.
- An introduction to
Programming with C# threads
Will your lock server for lab 1 use mutexes? Condition variables? Why
or why not? Give a specific example in your answer.
-
Implementing remote procedure calls
The RPC package for the 6.824 labs doesn't provide at-most-once
semantics, unlike the one described in the paper (see page 49, last
paragraph). How does this difference effect the implementation of
your lock server for lab 1?
-
Dryad: Distributed data-parallel
programs from sequential building blocks
Suppose you want to implement a distributed program that counts word
frequencies, taking as input a collection of files with words in them.
Sketch how this program might be implemented using Dryad.
-
A distributed object model for the
Java System
Suppose that you re-implemented lab1 using using Java RMI. In what
ways might your code become simpler compared to your C++
implementation? Give one or two specific examples.
-
Chord: a scalable peer-to-peer lookup
service for Internet applications
In chord a query takes log(n) hops to get from a source to the
destination. Are these log(n) hops along the shortest path in the
Internet from the source to the destination? Explain briefly why or
why not.
-
Democratizing content publication
with Coral
The Coral paper mentions in Sections 2.3 and 4.2 that Coral's
``sloppy'' DHT can store multiple different values for each key. What
would break, or not work as well, if Coral's DHT only stored one value
for each key?
-
Incentives Build Robustness in
BitTorrent and The BitTorrent P2P
File-Sharing System: Measurements and Analysis
Would the BitTorrent file distribution protocol achieve faster file
download times for clients without the tit-for-tat protocol? Briefly
explain your answer.
-
Memory Coherence in Shared Virtual Systems
The write fault handler in Section 3.1 ends by sending a confirmation
to the manager, and that the "Write server" code on the manager waits
for this confirmation. Suppose you eliminated this confirmation (both
the send and the wait) from the system. Describe a scenario in which
lack of the confirmation would cause the system to behave
incorrectly. You can assume that the network delivers all messages,
and that none of the computers fail.
-
Distributed Shared Memory on
Standard Workstations and Operating Systems
Suppose that a simplified version of Treadmarks, called Dreadmarks,
simply sent all modifications of variables between an acquire and a
release to the next processor to acquire the same lock. Deadmarks
doesn't otherwise communicate any changes to memory. Outline a
specific simple situation in which Treadmarks would provide more
useful or intuitive memory behavior than Dreadmarks.
-
File Synchronization with Vector Time Pairs
Why does Tra have two vectors times (modification time and synchronization time)?
-
Reimplementing the Cedar File System Using Logging and Group Commit
At the end of Section 4, the paper says that during a one-byte file
create FSD writes the leader+data page synchronously to the disk, but
records the update to the file name table in memory and only writes it
back to disk later. Why do you suppose the FSD designers decided to
write the data page synchronously? What (if anything) might go wrong
if FSD instead wrote the file's data in the in-memory disk cache, and
only wrote it to disk later?
-
Hypervisor-based Fault-tolerance
Suppose the primary fails due to a power failure, the backup takes
over, and then power to the primary is restored. You would like the
primary to resume replicated execution so that the system could
tolerate a subsequent failure of the backup. Is this likely to be easy
with hypervisor-based fault-tolerance? Why or why not?
-
Guardians and Actions: Linguistic Support for Robust, Distributed Programs
In Figure 4, read_mail deletes email from the mailbox. If
new mail arrives just before the delete, will the email be deleted but
not returned? Please briefly explain your answer.
-
Paxos Made Simple
After running Paxos, do all participants agree on the same value? If
so, briefly explain how this happens. If not, what do the
participants agree on?
-
Frangipani: A Scalable Distributed File System
Suppose a server modifies an i-node, appends the modification to its
log, then another server modifies the same i-node, and then the first
server crashes. The recovery system will see the i-node modification
in the crashed server's log, but should not apply that log entry to
the i-node, because that would un-do the second server's change. How
does Frangipani avoid or cope with this situation?
-
Shark: Scaling File Servers via Cooperative Caching
In Shark, how can a client be assured that when it downloads chunks of
a file from different proxies, none of the proxies tampered with
the contents of the file?
-
Secure Untrusted Data Repository (SUNDR)
In the simple straw-man, both fetch and modify operations are placed
in the log and signed. Suppose an alternate design that only signs and
logs modify operations. Does this allow a malicious server to break
fetch-modify consistency or fork consistency? Why or why not?
-
Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance
Compare and constrast SUNDR and BFT NFS. They both provide a secure
network file systems. In what ways do their security properties
differ?
-
Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router
Consider users that employ TOR to read their email via an unencrypted
IMAP connection. Does TOR guarantee complete anonymity for these
users? If so, please explain why. If not, what information could the
attacker learn about the user, and how might it do so?
-
Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store
Suppose Ben Bitdiddle wants to use Dynamo for a service that requires
extremely high levels of consistency and durability. To achieve this,
he sets N to be large, and then sets W = R = N. Does this guarantee
that he will never see divergent copies of an object? Why or why not?
-
Experiences with a Distributed, Scalable, Methodological File System: AnalogicFS
In many ways, this experiences paper raises more questions than it
answers. Please answer one of the following questions, taking into
consideration the rich history of AnalogicFS and the spirit in which
the paper was written:
a) The analysis of A* search shown in Figure 1 claims to be an
introspective visualization of the AnalogicFS methodology; however,
not all decisions are depicted in the figure. In particular, if I
<= P, what should be the next node explored such that all assumptions
in Section 2 still hold? Show your work.
b) Despite the authors' claims in the introduction that AnalogicFS was
developed to study SCSI disks (and their interaction with lambda
calculus), the experimental setup detailed in Section 4.1 involves
decommissioned Gameboys instead, which use cartridge-based, Flash-like
memory. If the authors had used actual SCSI disks during the
experiments, how exactly might have their results changed
quantitatively? (Note that Figure 2 actually shows the effective
throughput, not the 10th-percentile.)
c) AnalogicFS shows rather unstable multicast algorithm popularity
(Figure 5), especially compared with some of the previous systems
we've read about in 6.824. Give an example of another system that
would have a more steady measurement of popularity pages, especially
in the range of 0.1-0.4 decibels of bandwidth. Explain in detail why
this is the case.
d) For his 6.824 Lab 9 project, Ben Bitdiddle chose to extend YFS such
that it faithfully emulates the constant expected seek time across
LISP machines, as AnalogicFS does. Upon implementation, however, he
immediately ran into the need to cap the extent size to 400 nm, rather
than 676 nm. Explain what assumptions made for the AnalogicFS
implementation do not hold true for YFS, and why that changes the
maximum extent size.
Questions or comments regarding 6.824? Send e-mail to 6.824-staff@pdos.csail.mit.edu.
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