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This article describes recent progress in realizing verifiable state machines, a primitive that enables untrusted services to provide cryptographic proofs that they operate correctly. Applications of this primitive range from proving the correct operation of distributed and concurrent cloud services to reducing blockchain transaction costs by leveraging inexpensive off-chain computation without trust.

Resource disaggregation is a new architecture for data centers in which resources like memory and storage are decoupled from the CPU, managed independently, and connected through a high-speed network. Recent work has shown that although disaggregated data centers (DDCs) provide operational benefits, applications running on DDCs experience degraded performance due to extra network latency between the CPU and their working sets in main memory. DBMSs are an interesting case study for DDCs for two main reasons: (1) DBMSs normally process data-intensive workloads and require data movement between different resource components; and (2) disaggregation drastically changes the assumption that DBMSs can rely on their own internal resource management. We take the first step to thoroughly evaluate the query execution performance of production DBMSs in disaggregated data centers. We evaluate two popular open-source DBMSs (MonetDB and PostgreSQL) and test their performance with the TPC-H benchmark in a recently released operating system for resource disaggregation. We evaluate these DBMSs with various configurations and compare their performance with that of single-machine Linux with the same hardware resources. Our results confirm that significant performance degradation does occur, but, perhaps surprisingly, we also find settings in which the degradation is minor or where DDCs actually improve performance.

DRP is a new concurrency control protocol for software transactional memory that achieves high throughput, even for skewed workloads that exhibit high contention. DRP builds on prior works that chop transactions into pieces to expose more concurrency opportunities, but unlike these works, DRP performs no static analyses and supports arbitrary workloads. DRP achieves a high degree of concurrency across most workloads and guarantees deadlock freedom, strict serializability, and opacity. We incorporate DRP into the software transactional objects library STO [18] and find that DRP improves STO's throughput on several STAMP benchmarks by up to 3.6x. Additionally, an in-memory multicore database implemented with our modified variant of STO outperforms databases that use OCC or transaction chopping for concurrency control. Specifically, DRP achieves 6.6x higher throughput than OCC when contention is high. Compared to transaction chopping, our DRP achieves 3.3x higher throughput when contention is medium or low. Furthermore, our implementation achieves comparable performance to OCC and transaction chopping at other contention levels.