The ACM SIGMETRICS 2003 is held this week in San Diego. It is a conference that focuses on the measurement and modeling of all aspects of computer systems. In this years program my favorite is Efficient Implementation of a Statistics Counter Architecture' by Ramabhadran and Varghese from UCSD.
I like the limited complexity of the problem combined with the very strict boundaries within which it has to operate. It looks at optimizing a hardware/software architecture that needs to track statistics for a 10 GBps linecard with 1 million active counters and 10 counter updates per packet. It finds optimizations to a previous algorithms and optimizes the cache size required to handle to particular load. Even though the paper 'as-is' is limited in its applicability it did set me to think how to address similar problems in scalable distributed systems.
Posted by Werner Vogels at June 11, 2003 01:29 PM