Selecting a Paper

Highlighted Papers

The general rule of thumb is that papers discussed in the class should be published after 2010.  Here is a list of "selected papers" that, although they may be a few years older than our typical 2010+ standard, provide a strong introduction to cloud computing and related datacenter/architecture topics. 

Systems:

• [2012, 2014 class]  "Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing", by Michael Armbrust, et al. Technical Report, University of Berkeley, 2009
• "Data-Intensive Supercomputing: The case for DISC", by Randal Bryant, Technical Report, Carnegie Mellon University, 2007
• [2012, 2014, 2016 class]  "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters" by Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat (OSDI 2004)
• "FlumeJava: easy, efficient data-parallel pipelines" by Craig Chambers et. al. (PLDI 2010)
• "MillWheel: Fault-Tolerant Stream Processing at Internet Scale" by Tyler Akidau et. al (VLDB 2013)
• [2012, 2016 class]  "The Google File System" by Sanjay Ghemawat et al. (SOSP 2003)
• [2012 class]  "Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data", by Fay Chang et. al. (OSDI 2006)
• [2014 class] "Spanner: Google's Globally-Distributed Database" by J. Corbett et. al. (OSDI 2012)
• [2012, 2014 class]  "Windows Azure Storage: A Highly Available Cloud Storage Service with Strong Consistency" by Brad Calder et. al. (SOSP 2011)
• "Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store" by G. DeCandia et. al. (SOSP 2007)
• [2012 class]  "Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing", by Christopher Olston, et. al (SIGMOD 2008)
• "Building a High-Level Dataflow System on top of Map-Reduce: The Pig Experience" by Alan Gates et al. (VLDB 2009)
• [2012, 2014 class]  "Finding a needle in Haystack: Facebook’s photo storage" by Doug Beaver et. al. (OSDI 2010)
• "f4: Facebook's Warm BLOB Storage System" by Subramanian Muralidhar et. al. (OSDI 2014)
• "Dryad: Distributed Data-Parallel Programs from Sequential Building Blocks" by M. Isard et. al. (EuroSys 2007)
• "HAIL: A High-Availability and Integrity Layer for Cloud Storage" by Kevin Bowers et. al. (CCS 2009)
• "Flat Datacenter Storage" by E. Nightengale et. al. (OSDI 2012)

Security:

• [2012, 2014, 2016 class]  "Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud: Exploring Information Leakage in Third-Party Compute Clouds" by Thomas Ristenpart et. al. (CCS 2009)
• "A Placement Vulnerability Study in Multi-Tenant Public Clouds" by V. Varadarajan et. al. (USENIX Security Symposium 2015)  <-  Follow-up to "Hey You, Get Off of My Cloud"
• [2016 class] "Provable data possession at untrusted stores" by Giuseppe Ateniese et. al. (CCS 2007)
• [2012, 2014 class]  "CloudAV: N-Version Antivirus in the Network Cloud" by Oberheide et al. (USENIX Security 2008)
• [2014 class] "Cross-VM Side Channels and Their Use to Extract Private Keys" by Y. Zhang et. al., CCS 2012
• "Shielding Applications from an Untrusted Cloud with Haven" by Andrew Baumann et. al. (OSDI 2014)

Virtualization:

• [2014 class]  "SnowFlock: Rapid Virtual Machine Cloning for Cloud Computing" by H. Andres Lagar-Cavilla et al. (EuroSys 2009)
• [2012, 2014 class]  "Xen and the Art of Virtualization" by P. Barham et. al. (SOSP 2003)
• [2014 class]  "The evolution of an x86 virtual machine monitor" by O. Agesen et. al. (ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 2010)

• [2012 class]  "Live Migration of Virtual Machines" by C. Clark et. al., (NSDI 2005)
• "Black-box and Gray-box Strategies for Virtual Machine Migration" by T. Wood et. al., (NDSI 2007)

• "Post-Copy Based Live Virtual Machine Migration Using Adaptive Pre-Paging and Dynamic Self-Balloning" by Michael Hines et. al. (VEE 2009)
• "Difference Engine: Harnessing Memory Redundancy in Virtual Machines" by Diwaker Gupta (OSDI 2008)
• "I/O Paravirtualization at the Device File Boundary" by Ardalan Amiri Sani et. al. (ASPLOS 2014)
• "KVM/ARM: The Design and Implementation of the Linux ARM Hypervisor" by Christoffer Dall et. al. (ASPLOS 2014)

Networking:

• [2014 class] "Chatty Tenants and the Cloud Network Sharing Problem" by H. Ballani et. al. (NSDI 2013)
• "BCube: a high performance, server-centric network architecture for modular data centers" by C. Guo et. al. (SIGCOMM 2009)
• "NetPilot: Automating Datacenter Network Failure Mitigation" by X. Wu et. al. (SIGCOMM 2012)
• [2014 class]  "It’s Not Easy Being Green" by P. Gao et. al. (SIGCOMM 2012)
• "FairCloud: Sharing the Network in Cloud Computing" by L. Popa et. al. (SIGCOMM 2012)
• "Leveraging Endpoint Flexibility in Data-Intensive Clusters" by M. Chowdhury et. al. (SIGCOMM 2013)
• "How Hard Can It Be? Designing and Implementing a Deployable Multipath TCP" by C. Raiciu et. al. (NDSI 2012)
• [2014 class]  "Camdoop: Exploiting In-network Aggregation for Big Data Applications" by P. Costa et. al. (NSDI 2012)
• "VL2: A Scalable and Flexible Data Center Network" by A. Greenberg et. al. (SIGCOMM 2009)
• "PortLand: A Scalable Fault-Tolerant Layer 2 Data Center Network Fabric" by R. Mysore et. al (SIGCOMM 2009)
• "Floodless in SEATTLE: A Scalable Ethernet Architecture for Large Enterprises" by C. Kim (SIGCOMM 2008)
• "SPAIN: COTS Data-Center Ethernet for Multipathing over Arbitrary Topologies" by J. Mudigonda (NSDI 2010)
• "F10: A Fault-Tolerant Engineered Network" by V. Liu et. al. (NSDI 2013)
• "SmartSwitch: Blurring the Line Between Network Infrastructure & Cloud Applications" by Wei Zhang et. al. (HotCloud'14)
• [2016 class] "Rethinking the Network Stack for Rack-scale Computers" by Paolo Costa et. al. (HotCloud'14)
• "Network Virtualization in Multi-tenant Datacenters" by Teemu Koponen et. al. (NSDI 2014)
• [2016 class] "Inside the Social Network's (Datacenter) Network" by Arjun Roy et. al. (SIGCOMM 2015)
• [2016 class] "Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google's Datacenter Network" by Arjun Singh et. al. (SIGCOMM 2015)
• "Pingmesh: A Large-Scale System for Data Center Network Latency Measurement and Analysis" by Chuanxiong Guo et. al. (SIGCOMM 2015) 

Power:

• [2012, 2014 class]  "Power Routing: Dynamic Power Provisioning in the Data Center" by Steven Pelley et. al. (ASPLOS 2010)

• [2012, 2016 class]  "Gordon: Using Flash Memory to Build Fast, Power-efficient Clusters for Data-intensive Applications" by Adrian Caulfield et. al. (ASPLOS 2009)
• "FAWN: A Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes" (SOSP 2009) 
• [2016 class] "Underprovisioning Backup Power Infrastructure for Datacenters" by Di Wang et. al. (ASPLOS 2014)

Benchmarking:

• [2016 class]  "Clearing the Clouds: A Study of Emerging Scale-out Workloads on Modern Hardware" by M. Ferdman et. al. (ASPLOS 2012)

Gaming:

• [2016 class]  "On the Quality of Service of Cloud Gaming Systems" by Kuan-Ta Chen et. al. (IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Vol 16, Issue 2, 2013)
• "Outatime: Using Speculation to Enable Low-Latency Continuous Interaction for Mobile Cloud Gaming" by Kyungmin Lee et. al. (MobiSys 2015)

Conference / Workshops on Cloud Computing Topics

You may also select papers from the following list of "approved" conferences and workshops, provided that the paper was published after 2010.  Want to add additional conferences to this list? Email Dr. Shafer for approval.

• Cloud Computing (and Parallel / Distributed Systems)
• USENIX  Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) - See 2014, 2012, 2010
• ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing (CCGRID)
• ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC)
• ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop (CCSW) - See CCSW'13, CCSW'12, CCSW'11, CCSW'10
• ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) - See CCS'13, CCS'12, CCS'11, CCS'10
• USENIX HotCloud Workshop (HotCloud) - See 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010
• Other IEEE TCSC Cloud Computing Conferences
• Computer Networking (try to limit papers to topics tangentially related to cloud computing, such as large-scale datacenter networks, etc...)
• ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM)
• ACM/IEEE Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS)
• USENIX Symposium on Networked System Design and Implementation (NDSI)
• Computer Architecture (try to limit papers to topics tangentially related to cloud computing)
• International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) - See 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010
• International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) - See ISCA 2015, etc...
• IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)
• International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)
• ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE)

You can search for papers in Google Scholar, the ACM Digital Library (on campus only!), or IEEE Explore (on campus only!).