weekly-papers

Weekly Paper Notes — Seminal Paper of the Week. Area: Databases. Author: E. F. Codd (IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 6, June 1970, pp. 377–387 DOI: 10.1145/362384.362685 Why the paper still matters Codd’s paper is eight pages long, contains no system, no benchmark, and no evaluation section. It would very likely struggle to get past a modern program committee. It is also, by a wide margin, the most economically consequential paper in the history of computer science — the entire relational database industry, SQL, the query optimizer as a discipline, and by extension most of what we call “data infrastructure” descend from it....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-15 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML. Authors: Julian Minder, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Raghav Singhal (equal contribution), Difan Jiao, Andy Arditi, Shaobo Cui, Jannik Brinkmann, Ashton Anderson, Roland Aydin, Robert West, and others — EPFL, MATS, University of Toronto, Saarland University, Northeastern, SJTU, DFKI, Ontocord AI, Hereon/TUHH arXiv: 2608.13482 · PDF · Models & data TL;DR Every production language model today learns what the world is like during pretraining and only learns who it is supposed to be afterwards, during post-training....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-15 CS paper digest. Area: Operating Systems / Systems. Authors: Yuan Si (University of Waterloo), Yufeng Lin (Independent), Daming Li (Independent), Jialu Zhang (University of Waterloo, corresponding) arXiv: 2608.12103 · PDF TL;DR A trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model routes each token through a small, input-dependent slice of its weights — in the production model studied here, an accepted token costs on average 1585 expert reads of 17....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-08 CS paper digest. Area: Distributed Computing / Computer Architecture. Authors: Jirong Yang, Peizhe Liu, Jovan Stojkovic (UT Austin); Chaojie Zhang (Microsoft Azure) arXiv: 2608.04458 · PDF TL;DR Datacenter servers have been optimized for two workload shapes: CPU-centric services (web serving, key-value stores, analytics) and monolithic LLM inference, where a GPU does dense tensor math and the host merely feeds it....

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-08-08 CS paper digest. Area: Programming Languages / Concurrency (rotating away from a long run of distributed-systems picks). Author: C. A. R. Hoare (Queen’s University, Belfast) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 8, August 1978, pp. 666–677 DOI: 10.1145/359576.359585 Why the paper still matters If you have written ch <- v in Go, spawned an Erlang process and sent it a message, wired up an actor in Akka, or reasoned about a Rust mpsc channel, you have been programming in a dialect of a language sketched in eleven pages of CACM in 1978....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-08 CS paper digest. Area: Systems / Networking. Authors: Sarah McClure (UC Berkeley), Tegan Wilson (Northeastern), Brad Karp (UCL / Google), Michael Mitzenmacher (Harvard), Sylvia Ratnasamy (UC Berkeley), Scott Shenker (UC Berkeley / ICSI), Minlan Yu (Harvard) arXiv: 2608.01707 · PDF TL;DR Every large ML training system sits on one of two interconnect families: the fat-tree Clos that GPUs inherited from datacenter networking, or the torus that TPUs inherited from HPC....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-01 CS paper digest. Area: Systems / Networking. Authors: Evyatar Cohen, Jose Yallouz, Mark Silberstein, Isaac Keslassy (Technion); Alexander Shpiner (NVIDIA); Sylvia Ratnasamy, Isaac Keslassy (UC Berkeley) arXiv: 2607.26340 · PDF TL;DR Mixture-of-Experts models route each token to a small subset of experts, which turns every MoE layer into a highly skewed all-to-all communication phase across the GPU fabric....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-08-01 CS paper digest. Area: Operating Systems / Formal Methods. Authors: Qian Cheng, Ruize Tang, Yu Huang (Nanjing University); Saad Mohammad Rafid Pial, Yiming Su, Tianyin Xu (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign); Emilie Ma, Finn Hackett, Ivan Beschastnikh (University of British Columbia) arXiv: 2607.25333 · PDF · Code TL;DR Formal verification of real systems has always been bottlenecked by the same thing: writing a good TLA+ specification takes a domain expert months, and the specification immediately begins drifting away from the code it describes....

Weekly Paper Notes — 🔁 Seminal Paper of the Week, 2026-08-01. Area: Operating Systems / Storage. Authors: Mendel Rosenblum, John K. Ousterhout (University of California, Berkeley) Published: ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, Vol. 10, No. 1, February 1992 (SOSP ‘91) DOI: 10.1145/146941.146943 Why this paper still matters Almost every high-performance storage system built in the last fifteen years is a log-structured file system wearing a different name. LevelDB, RocksDB, Cassandra, HBase, Kafka, every SSD’s flash translation layer, ZFS’s copy-on-write, btrfs, WiredTiger, Lucene’s segment merges — all of them convert random writes into sequential appends and then run a background process to reclaim space....

Weekly Paper Notes — one of the top picks from the 2026-07-25 CS paper digest. Area: AI / ML (Agent Training). Authors: Xiao Yu, Baolin Peng, Ruize Xu et al. arXiv: 2607.21557 · PDF TL;DR Modern agents are shaped less by their base model and more by the harness wrapped around it — Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, GUI-use scaffolds. But those harnesses are stateful, multi-process, and full of tool orchestration, which means existing open SFT/RL stacks (veRL, TRL, OpenRLHF) can’t natively express a rollout inside one....