Flavor
NY Systems Reading Group (NYSRG) is a place for people to learn about computer systems together.
Computer systems are the building blocks of applications and the fabric that ties them together. Databases, networks, programming languages, compilers, distributed coordination algorithms, optimizers, orchestrators, verifiers, libraries, …
NYSRG welcomes people from all backgrounds. We believe that diverse experiences enrich group discourse, and we try to find a pace suitable for everyone.
We typically read during the session. Non-reading time is dedicated to open group discussion: summary, interpretation, detailed review, criticism, and contextualization; to promote individual curiosity and understanding.
Our meetings are weekly on Sunday. You're not expected to have attended previous weeks.
Computers are pretty cool; let's explore!
Schedule
We curate for texts that are of broad interest to systems and application designers, while having excellent quality of prose and opportunities for hands-on learning.
(Not so serious though; computers should be fun, dang it!)
Writing git from scratch
Git is a version control system used by the most of the world's software
developers. What's under the hood? Let's get a glimpse into the workings
of the .git
folder, featuring content-addressed storage and hash
trees.
Commits are snapshots, not diffs •Git's database internals I •Write yourself a Git
Compiling mlc, the course
Compilers in machine learning are the silent toolchains that make compute possible at massive scale, on CPUs and on hardware accelerators like GPUs. How do they work? And what really goes into doing matrix multiplication fast?
Perspectives on async
Cooperative and preemptive multitasking, schedulers, concurrency vs parallelism models, and how they influence language features. Case studies in Go and Rust internals, and mentions of Python, JavaScript, C#, Dart, and Lua.
What Color is Your Function? •Goroutines •Async/Await •Structured concurrency
The database storage layer
Host: Mufeez Amjad and Rama Tadepalli
Storage is at the heart of databases, lying below execution and query planning, but above the file system, OS, and hardware. Let's learn about them and get started with our own.
Disk-Oriented DBMS Overview •mmap •LSM Trees •Database Internals
Web browser security
Host: Raghav Anand
Security is hard, and browsers are incredibly complex artifacts with tens of millions of lines of code. What could go wrong? From distributed systems security to process sandboxing, and from type confusion to Spectre.
Understanding The Web Security Model •Spectre.js •Site Isolation •CVE-2023-3420
Build systems
Host: Val Kharitonov and Fang Shuo Deng
Build processes are complex and computationally intensive. How can we make builds fast, reproducible, and flexible, all while retaining simplicity? Maybe studying their underpinnings and reimplementing them can teach us a bit about computing.
Virtualization with KVM
Complex systems tend to produce more copies of themselves, and computers are no exception to this self-referential behavior. Let's see how virtualization and emulation work on the OS and machine levels.
Structured data encoding
Schema-based binary formats, and their associated languages, for specifying and serializing structured data. Design tradeoffs for RPCs, data archiving, OLAP, and embedded.
Protocol Buffers •Cap'n Proto •rkyv •Apache Arrow •Cornflakes
What the k8s!
Kubernetes is, undeniably, tech's favorite system for deploying code. It's also crazy complex. Let's look at it (a healthy serving of YAML!), then at Slurm (a scheduler for supercomputers from the 2000s), so we can discuss what the essential complexity is.
Kubernetes (O'Reilly) •R with k8s •Cluster Architecture •CRI Spec •SLURM
Time series databases
Time-series databases index massive amounts of data. They're the tools that let engineers understand and do more with systems. How do they work, and what are the key data structures and ideas in balancing their speed, storage, and cost?
InfluxDB •Prometheus •Gorilla (VLDB '15) •Monarch (VLDB '20)
Make a plasmid viewer
You may have no idea what a plasmid is, me neither! It's a circular DNA sequence. But treat this as a complex data visualization and UI exercise. We'll each try to write an interactive SVG viewer, learning about libraries and reactive programming models.
The JVM specification
We'll read the specification for the Java Virtual Machine, with a focus on Chapter 3 (compilation). Java is the most successful cross-platform compiled bytecode in the world.
Compilers compiling compilers
Compilers compile code. But compilers are also code themselves. It's 2024, and as we reflect on our past and present, let's also reflect on some of the classic and modern takes on self-referentiality of compilers and staging.
Reflections on Trusting Trust •Futamura •Essence of Incremental Computation
Compression with zstd
Exploring state-of-the-art lossless data compression. How do you pack big things in a small package, fast? (Note: This is a hard algorithm and we probably won't make it all the way through in one sitting.)
LZ77 •Asymmetric Numeral Systems •Zstd blog post •Zstd spec •Brotli
Media codecs
Still talking about compression like last week, but lossy codecs come with spicy cosine transforms, color spaces, and legal trickery. Video encoding is also absurdly complicated; who knew an algorithm could be broken up into 5000+ patents!
Web audio codec guide •Web video codec guide •PNG •JPEG •MP3 •VP8
zstd spec, revisited
We'll continue where we left off in Week 14 by understanding finite-state entropy in depth. Then, buckle down to read the actual zstd spec, followed by Brotli.
Finite State Entropy (series) •RFC 8878 (Zstd) •RFC 7932 (Brotli)
Linux executables
What goes into executables and dynamic linking? How do they work, and how much of their functionality is engineered versus operating system magic? We'll start reading a series by Amos Wenger.
Zig compiler internals
A blog post by Mitchell Hashimoto, dissecting the Zig compiler. Zig is a self-hosted, low-level compiled systems programming language.
The WireGuard protocol
Host: Abel Matthew
The working operations of a secure VPN tunnel. Public-key cryptography and forward secrecy, parallelism techniques, and kernel networking.
String indexing algorithms
What ties together FASTA, ripgrep, bzip2, Prometheus, and Sublime Text? Algorithms and data structures for practical string indexing and search, with a healthy dose of practical automata theory.
Skew Algorithm (2003) •Index 1,600,000,000 Keys with Automata and Rust
Distributed training
Training big ML models is the elephant in the room. So everyone starts by talking about compute, but it ends up being mostly about networking. Hello, data movement!
Allreduce (2017) •How to Train Really Large Models on Many GPUs? (2021) •Everything about Distributed Training and Efficient Finetuning (2024) •Tensor Parallelism with jax.pjit (2022)
Linux kernel programming
We'll read through a recent guide on Linux kernel module programming in C. (Before the meeting, get an x86-64 cloud VM with a fresh install of Ubuntu 22.04.)
io_uring
Reading about an up-and-coming Linux subsystem for high-performance async I/O. Thinking about memory access models, buffer ownership, and fault-tolerant parallelism.
Is there really no asynchronous block I/O on Linux? •Lord of the io_uring •Notes on io-uring •tokio-rs/io-uring
Memory allocators
A discussion of general-purpose memory allocators. We'll focus on the successful jemalloc, and the newer but promising mimalloc. Let's peruse some source code if time permits.
jemalloc (2006) •mimalloc (2019) •std.heap.general_purpose_allocator
AOSA Volume 1
Selected readings from The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume 1. How the software we know and love was designed, redesigned, and built.
AOSA Volume 2, part 1
Selected readings from The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume 2.
matplotlib •PyPy •processing.js •The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
The Ceph trilogy, parts 1+2
Host: Ori Bernstein
A trio of classic papers on building a distributed file system from the ground up for exabyte-scale storage. How the biggest organizations in the world keep track of data. Let's start with the first two papers: CRUSH and RADOS.
The Ceph trilogy, part 3
Host: Ori Bernstein
We'll continue where we left off from last week, reading the Ceph distributed file system paper from OSDI '06. Ceph is a near-POSIX file system built on CRUSH and RADOS.
Organizers
This is being run by me, Eric! (Twitter: @ekzhang1)
I previously ran a similar reading group at Harvard for a year.