40167878
Why do Computer Stop and What Can be About it?
10364748
Why Do Computers Stop and What Can Be Done About It?
An analysis of the failure statistics of a commercially available fault-tolerant system shows that administration and software are the major contributors to failure. Various approaches to software fault-tolerance are then discussed -- notably process-pairs, transactions and reliable storage. It is pointed out that faults in production software are often soft (transient) and that a transaction mechanism combined with persistent processpairs provides fault-tolerant execution -- the key to software fault-tolerance.
5374830
Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques
From the Publisher: 
The key to client/server computing. 
Transaction processing techniques are deeply ingrained in the fields of databases and operating systems and are used to monitor, control and update information in modern computer systems. This book will show you how large, distributed, heterogeneous computer systems can be made to work reliably. Using transactions as a unifying conceptual framework, the authors show how to build high-performance distributed systems and high-availability applications with finite budgets and risk. 
 
The authors provide detailed explanations of why various problems occur as well as practical, usable techniques for their solution. Throughout the book, examples and techniques are drawn from the most successful commercial and research systems. Extensive use of compilable C code fragments demonstrates the many transaction processing algorithms presented in the book. The book will be valuable to anyone interested in implementing distributed systems or client/server architectures.
5777516
Thousands of DebitCredit Transactions-Per-Second: Easy and Inexpensive
A $2k computer can execute about 8k transactions per second. This is 80x more than one of the largest US bank's 1970's traffic - it approximates the total US 1970's financial transaction volume. Very modest modern computers can easily solve yesterday's problems.
15815014
The Revolution Yet to Happen
By 2047 almost all information will be in cyberspace—including a large percentage of knowledge and creative works. All information about physical objects, including humans, buildings, processes, and organizations, will be online. This trend is both desirable and inevitable. Cyberspace will provide the basis for wonderful new ways to inform, entertain, and educate people. The information and the corresponding systems will streamline commerce but will also provide new levels of personal service, health care, and automation. The most significant benefit will be a breakthrough in our ability to communicate remotely with one another using all our senses.
9414220
Spatial Clustering of Galaxies in Large Datasets
Datasets with tens of millions of galaxies present new challenges for the analysis of spatial clustering. We have built a framework, that integrates a database of object catalogs, tools for creating masks of bad regions, and a fast (NlogN) correlation code. This system has enabled unprecedented efficiency in carrying out the analysis of galaxy clustering in the SDSS catalog. A similar approach is used to compute the three-dimensional spatial clustering of galaxies on very large scales. We describe our strategy to estimate the effect of photometric errors using a database. We discuss our efforts as an early example of data-intensive science. While it would have been possible to get these results without the framework we describe, it will be infeasible to perform these computations on the future huge datasets without using this framework.
16793812
Future Directions in DBMS Research - The Laguna Beach Participants
On February 4-5, 1988, the International Computer Science Institute sponsored a two day workshop at which 16 senior members of the data base research community discussed future research topics in the DBMS area. This paper summarizes the discussion which took place.