storage

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....

arXiv: 2607.02401 · PDF: pdf · Published: 2026-07-02 TL;DR NVM key-value stores have gotten fast at ingest and point lookup, but they’ve skipped the interface guarantees a real database engine needs: point-in-time snapshots, consistent iterators, and atomic batches. FlintKV is an NVM-optimized, skiplist-based engine that natively supports all three under durable linearizability, using a novel flat-combining multi-version concurrency control algorithm co-designed with its persistence path. Standalone it beats prior work by up to 75% in end-to-end throughput; its durable skiplist can also be dropped into existing NVM stores as a component upgrade....

Seminal Paper of the Week — the paper that quietly defined what “cloud storage” looks like from the inside. Authors: Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, Shun-Tak Leung (Google) Published: SOSP ‘03 — 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, October 2003. Canonical link: The Google File System (Google research mirror) · ACM DOI 10.1145/945445.945450 TL;DR In 2003, Ghemawat, Gobioff and Leung described how Google was running a multi-thousand-node, petabyte-scale distributed file system on commodity hardware — and how the design assumptions diverged so sharply from the established POSIX-file-system lineage that almost every architectural decision in the paper looks like a heresy until you read the workload section....