Here are some papers that are potentially of interest.

​Dynamo: Amazon's Highly Available Key-value Store -- sophisticated distributed hash table polished by extensive high-performance practical usage; An excellent paper!

​Fixing the Embarrassing Slowness of OpenDHT on PlanetLab (2005) -- practical lessons in DHT performance that theoreticians learned by deployment

​Non-Transitive Connectivity and DHTs -- practical lessons in dealing with not-fully-connected DHTs that theoreticians learned in deployment

​POST: A Secure, Resilient, Cooperative Messaging System -- use a DHT for messaging; includes a suggestion to ameliorate the confidentiality problems of single-instance store by adding random bits to small text messages

​A brief history of Consensus, 2PC and Transaction Commit. -- a web page summarizing the evolution of the academic theory of decentralized, reliable systems.

​Measurement and Analysis of TCP Throughput Collapse in Cluster-based Storage Systems -- Hm... Could this happen to us?

Crypto

Symmetric Primitives

​Salsa20 Design a fast and secure cipher

​Salsa20 Security Arguments why Salsa20 is probably safe against this and that threat

​EnRUPT a very simple, fast, and flexible primitive which could be used as both stream cipher and secure hash function (the two such primitives that we currently need) and which relies for its security on a large number of rounds. The question of how many rounds to use is decided by semi-automated cryptanalysis.

Elliptic Curve Cryptography

​ECC Brainpool Standard Curves and Curve Generation new elliptic curve parameters which are more certain to be safe

Local Filesystems

​Model-Based Failure Analysis of Journaling File Systems ​PDF compares ext3, reiserfs, and JFS under conditions of latent sector errors. (Impatient people: read the Introduction and look at the table on page 9.)

​IRON Filesystems ​PDF, a follow-on by the authors of "Model-Based Failure Analysis of Journaling File Systems" examines how ext3, reiserfs, xfs, and ntfs handle various sorts of errors (impatient people, see table on page 8, "File System Summary" on page 9, and table on page 10).

​Using Model Checking to Find Serious File System Errors ​PDF analyzes ext3, JFS, and reiserfs (impatient: page 10).

​eXplode: A lightweight, general approach for finding serious errors in storage systems, a follow-on by the authors of "Using Model Checking to Find Serious File System Errors", compares ext2, ext3, reiserfs, reiser4, jfs, xfs, msdos, vfat, hfs, and hfs+ to see if you sync them and then crash them if your allegedly synced data is actually recoverable (impatient: page 11)

See Also

This page is inspired by ​flud's ​Related Papers page, which is well worth reading.

See also Ludovic Courtès's excellent ​bibliography of cooperative backup.

See also our RelatedProjects page.