SWE Tea

SWE Tea

SWE tea is a weekly-ish group that meets to discuss software engineering and computer science papers.

Format

We usually meet remotely and walk through each paper in the order it is written, discussing what stood out to us in each section. The discussion is informal and unrecorded, so we can feel free to explore ideas and be wrong. We encourage sharing related stories from our own personal or professional experience. The vibes are programmer buddies meeting up at a bar.

We are currently aiming for 1 meetup every week, typically on Sundays at 7pm EST, in our Whatsapp group. We prefer to reschedule meetups and not to cancel, so there may be more meetups in the weeks surrounding those with breaks. Scheduling is dynamic and changes are communicated asynchronously in the whatsapp group. However, there is a

Shared Google Calendar

Paper Selection

We are less interested in the cutting edge and prefer to sample the best papers from a variety of topics across software engineering and computer science. Topics range from high performance computing, big tech infrastructure, data centers, networks, operating systems, storage, machine learning, and algorithms.

We select papers in themed batches of four to eight. Themes help us amortize the cost of background familiarization and are read chronologically to follow the development of an idea across time. Themes should be small (to maintain intra-batch focus) and should only be revisited after a few intervening batches (for inter-batch variety).

Ideally, themes identify a problem space and each paper builds on the previous – pushing the frontier at the time. It is not enough that papers cite each other or are about the same topic. Good themes often come from a small group of people working in the same domain, across time and possibly institutions.

Each paper should be peer reviewed to ensure quality. In our experience, papers only published on research.facebook.com or arxiv are of inconsistent quality. Good sources of papers include “best paper awards” and “test of time awards” from Top Publication Venues in Computer Science as well as  whitepapers of technology used in production at large companies.

Next papers

Binary Sandboxing (WASM origin story)

• Native Client: A Sandbox for Portable, Untrusted x86 Native Code (2009)
• Language-Independent Sandboxing of JIT Compilation and Self-Modifying Code (2011)  
• Bringing the Web up to Speed with WebAssembly (2017) 
• Faasm: Lightweight Isolation for Efficient Stateful Serverless Computing (2020)
• Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly (2020)

Past papers

WASM Origin (18)

2026 August

• Meetup 125 - Evaluating SFI for a CISC Architecture (2006)

2026 July

• Meetup 124 - Efficient Software-Based Fault Isolation (SFI) (1993)

TPUs (17)

• Meetup 123 - Google's Training Supercomputers from TPU v2 to Ironwood: Architectural Stability, Scale, Resilience, Power Efficiency, and Sustainability Across Five Generations (2026)
• Meetup 122 - Resiliency at Scale: Managing Google’s TPUv4 ML Supercomputer (2024)
• Meetup 121 - TPU v4: An Optically Reconfigurable Supercomputer for ML with HW Support for Embeddings (2023)

2026 June

• Meetup 120 - Ten Lessons From Three Generations Shaped Google’s TPUv4i (2021)
• Meetup 119 - The Design Process for Google's Training Chips: TPUv2 and TPUv3 (2021)
• Meetup 118 - In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit  (2017)

Virtualization (16)

• Meetup 117 - KVM/ARM: The Design and Implementation of the Linux ARM Hypervisor (2014)

2026 May

• Meetup 116 - Firecracker: Lightweight Virtualization for Serverless Applications (2020)
• Meetup 115 - virtio: towards a de-facto standard for virtual I/O devices (2008)
• Meetup 114 - A Comparison of Software and Hardware Techniques for x86 Virtualization (2006)
• Meetup 113 - kvm: the Linux Virtual Machine Monitor (2007)

Blackbox Optimization Platforms (15)

• Meetup 112 - Ax: A Platform for Adaptive Experimentation (2025, Meta)

2026 April

• Meetup 111 - BOTORCH: A Framework for Efficient Monte-Carlo Bayesian Opt (2020, Meta)
• Meetup 110 - Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework (2019)
• Meetup 109 - Google Vizier: A Service for Black-Box Optimization (2017)

Industrial Recommender Systems (14)

• Meetup 108 - Actions Speak Louder than Words: Trillion-Parameter Sequential Transducers for Generative Recommendations (2024, Instagram)

2026 March

• Meetup 107 - Recommender Systems with Generative Retrieval (2023, Deepmind)
• Meetup 106 - Monolith: Real Time Rec Sys With Collisionless Embedding Table (2022, Tiktok)
• Meetup 105 - Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Web-Scale Rec Sys (2018, Pinterest)

• Meetup 104 - Deep Interest Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction (2017, Alibaba)
• Meetup 103 - Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations (2016, Youtube)

2026 February

Static PGO (13)

• Meetup 102 - ECO: An LLM-Driven Efficient Code Optimizer for WSC (2025)
• Meetup 101 - Propeller: A Profile Guided, Relinking Optimizer for WSC Applications (2023)
• Meetup 💯 - APT-GET: Profile-guided Timely Software Prefetching (2022)
• Meetup 099 - AsmDB: Understanding and Mitigating FE Stalls in WSCs (2019)

2026 January

• Meetup 098 - AutoFDO: automatic FDO for WSC applications (2016)
• Meetup 097 - BOLT: A Practical Binary Optimizer for Data Centers and Beyond (2018)
• Meetup 096 - Lightweight Feedback-Directed Cross-Module Optimization (2010)

2025 December

Debuggers/Sanitizers (12)

• Meetup 095 - TikTag: Breaking ARM's Memory Tagging Extension w/ Speculative Execution (2024)
• Meetup 094 - Memory Tagging and how it improves memory safety (2018)

• Armv8.5-A Memory Tagging Extension White Paper

2025 November

• Meetup 093 - MemorySanitizer: fast detector of uninitialized memory use in C++ (2015)
• Meetup 092 - AddressSanitizer: A Fast Address Sanity Checker (2012)
• Meetup 091 - ThreadSanitizer: data race detection in practice (2009)

• Dynamic Race Detection with LLVM Compiler (2011)

• Meetup 090 - Valgrind: A Framework for Heavyweight Dynamic Binary Instrumentation (2007)

Power Oversubscription (11)

• Meetup 089 - Prediction-Based Power Oversubscription in Cloud Platforms (2021)

2025 October

• Meetup 088 - A Scalable Priority-Aware Approach to Managing Data Center Server Power (2019)
• Meetup 087 - Thunderbolt: Throughput-Optimized, QoS-Aware Power Capping at Scale (2020)
• Meetup 086 - DC Power Oversub with a MV Power Plane and Priority-Aware Capping (2020)
• Meetup 085 - Expanding DC Capacity with DVFS Boosting: A safe and scalable deployment experience

2025 September

Special!

• Meetup 084 - Facade: High-Precision Insider Threat Detection Using Deep Contextual Anomaly Detection 

LLM Post training (10)

• Meetup 083 - Magistral (2025, Good example of near-SOTA post training)
• Meetup 082 - DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL (2025)
• Meetup 081 - Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks (2025)

2025 August

• Meetup 080 - Self-Rewarding Language Models (2024)
• Meetup 079 - RLAIF vs. RLHF: Scaling RL from Human Feedback with AI Feedback (2023)
• Meetup 078 - Direct Preference Optimization: Your LM is Secretly a Reward Model (2023)
• Meetup 077 - Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback  (2022)
• Meetup 076 - Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (2022)

2025 July

Huge Pages (9)

• Meetup 075 - Making Huge Pages Actually Useful (2018)
• Meetup 074 - Coordinated and Efficient Huge Page Management with Ingens (2016)
• Meetup 073 - Practical, Transparent OS Support for Superpages (2002)

Far Memory (8)

• Meetup 072 - Software-Defined Far Memory in Warehouse-Scale Computers (2019)

2025 June

• Meetup 071 - AIFM: High-Performance, Application-Integrated Far Memory
• Meetup 070 - FaRM: Fast Remote Memory
• Meetup 069 - Fire-Flyer AI-HPC: A Cost-Effective Sw-Hw Co-Design for DL
• Meetup 068 - Efficient Memory Disaggregation with Infiniswap
• Meetup 067 - Using RDMA efficiently for key-value services

2025 May

• Meetup 066 - Using One-Sided RDMA Reads to Build a Fast, CPU-Efficient Key-Value Store

Reinforcement Learning (7)

• Meetup 065 - SFT Memorizes, RL Generalizes: A Comparative Study of Foundation Model Post-training

2025 April

• Meetup 064 - DeepSeekMath - Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO, 2024)
• Meetup 063 - Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms (PPO, 2017)
• Meetup 062 - High-Dimensional Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation (GAE, 2015)
• Meetup 061 - Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO, 2015)

2025 March

• Meetup 060 - Simple statistical gradient-following algorithms for connectionist RL (1992)
• Meetup 059 - Sample Efficient Reinforcement Learning with REINFORCE (2010)

Fast Text Models (6)

• Meetup 058 - FastText.zip: Compressing text classification models
• Meetup 057 - Bag of Tricks for Efficient Text Classification
• Meetup 056 - Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information

Spanner (5)

• Meetup 055 - Detection and Prevention of Silent Data Corruption in an Exabyte-scale Database 
• Meetup 054 - F1: A Distributed SQL Database That Scales 

2025 February

• Meetup 053 - Spanner: Becoming a SQL System
• Meetup 052 - Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database

• And (short article) Spanner, TrueTime & The CAP Theorem 

• Meetup 051 - Practical uses of synchronized clocks in distributed systems (1991)

2025 January

Book special!

• Meetup 050 - FOCUS – THE ASML WAY

Observability (4)

• Meetup 049 - Fay: Extensible Distributed Tracing from Kernels to Clusters 
• Meetup 048 - Fathom: Understanding Datacenter Application Network Performance
• Meetup 047 - Dhalion: Self-Regulating Stream Processing in Heron 
• Meetup 046 - Profiling a warehouse-scale computer

2024 December

• Meetup 045 - Dapper, a Large-Scale Distributed Systems Tracing Infrastructure
• Meetup 044 - Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers (2010)

Network November (3)

• Meetup 043 - Beyond Fat-Trees without Antennae, Mirrors, and Disco-Balls 
• Meetup 042 - A Large Scale Study of Data Center Network Reliability (2018)

2024 November

• Meetup 041 - Fast Packet Processing with eBPF and XDP (2020)
• Meetup 040 - Running BGP in Data Centers at Scale - Meta Research
• Meetup 039 - FBOSS: Building Switch Software at Scale - Meta Research
• Meetup 038 - Jupiter Evolving: Transforming Google's Network via Optical Circuit Switches & SDN
• Meetup 037 - Jupiter Rising: A Decade of Clos Topologies and Centralized Control in Google’s DC Network

2024 October

Specialized Databases (2)

• Meetup 036 - TAO: Facebook’s Distributed Data Store for the Social Graph
• Meetup 035 - ClickHouse - Lightning Fast Analytics for Everyone
• Meetup 034 - Gorilla: A Fast, Scalable, In-Memory Time Series Database

• Meetup 033 - Linearizable State Machine Replication of State-Based CRDTs without Logs
• Meetup 032 - Applied Machine Learning at Facebook: A Datacenter Infrastructure Perspective 

Schedulers/Cluster management (1)

• Meetup 031 - Borg Autopilot

2024 September

• Meetup 030 - Borg the Next Generation
• Meetup 029 - Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg
• Meetup 028 - Remus: High Availability via Asynchronous Virtual Machine Replication (2015)
• Meetup 027 - Twine: A Unified Cluster Management System for Shared Infrastructure

The time before themes (0)

• Meetup 026 - Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General RL Algorithm (2017)

2024 August

• Meetup 025 - Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search (2016) 
• Meetup 024 - Towards Modern Development of Cloud Application (2023)
• Meetup 023

• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
• RocksDB: Evolution of Development Priorities continued, section 4+
• Rescheduled date: August 11, 1pm EST

• Meetup 022

• RocksDB: Evolution of Development Priorities in a Kv Store Serving Large-scale
• Sections 1 to 3
• Moved to Friday, Aug 2nd @ 5pm.

2024 July

• Meetup 021 - Scuba: Diving into Data at Facebook
• Meetup 020 - ThinLTO: Scalable and incremental LTO 
• Meetup 019 - Build systems a la carte (2024-07-10)
• Meetup 018 - CRUSH: Controlled, Scalable, Decentralized Placement of Replicated Data

2024 June

• Meetup 017 - Double ratchet and Sesame
• Meetup 016 - Ceph: A Scalable, High-Performance Distributed File System | USENIX 
• Meetup 015 - Snap: a Microkernel Approach to Host Networking - (2024-06-03)

2024 May

• Meetup 014 - What is Asymmetric Numeral Systems? (May 31st, 2024)
• Meetup 013 - LZ4 compression algorithm on FPGA
• Meetup 012 - Dynamo: Facebook’s Data Center-Wide Power Management System

2024 April

• Meetup 011 - Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer 
• Meetup 010 - Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems | DTrace 
• Meetup 009 - Understanding the Mirai Botnet - April 3rd, 2024

2024 March

• Inside the infamous Mirai IoT Botnet: A Retrospective Analysis 

• Meetup 008 - Xen and the art of virtualization (2003), March 27th, 2024

• Quick slides: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/papers/2004-xen-ols.pdf
• (optional) MirageOS: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628
• This paper is a seminal paper in virtualization technology, pointing out the need for software TLB’s, which did not exist in x86 at the time.

• Meetup 007 - Vector similarity search, March 13th, 2024

• Accelerating Large-Scale Inference with Anisotropic Vector Quantization (2019)

2024 February

• Meetup 006 - Facebook’s Tectonic Filesystem: Efficiency from Exascale (2021), Feb 29th, 2024
• Meetup 005 - Percolator, Feb 27th, 2024

• Paper: Large-scale Incremental Processing Using Distributed Transactions and Notifications (2010)

• Meetup 004 - KLL Optimal Quantile Approximation in Streams (2016), Feb 21th, 2024
• Meetup 003 - Operating System Evolution, Feb 7th, 2024

• Perspectives on OS foundations | SOSP History Day 2015 (talk)
• The rise of cloud computing systems | SOSP History Day 2015 (talk)
• Fifty Years of Operating Systems (2016) (short article)
• Parallel computing and the OS | SOSP History Day 2015 

2024 January

• Meetup 002 - Meltdown and Specter, Jan 31st 2024

• Project Zero: Reading privileged memory with a side-channel (2018) (Blog post)
• Spectre Attacks: Exploiting Speculative Execution
• https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown
• The Intel 80x86 Processor Architecture: Pitfalls for Secure Systems (1995)

• Meetup 001 - on Huge Pages, Jan 24th, 2024

• Paper: Adaptive Hugepage Subrelease for Non-moving Memory Allocators in Warehouse-Scale Computers (2021)
• Addon: Beyond malloc efficiency to fleet efficiency: a hugepage-aware memory allocator
• Addon: Unleashing the Power of Allocator-Aware Software Infrastructure
• We’re switching it up a little this week, with one main paper and two other potential papers.

• Meetup 000 - on Slicer, Jan 17th, 2024

• Paper: Slicer: Auto-Sharding for Datacenter Applications (2016)
• Summary: “Slicer: Auto-Sharding for Datacenter Applications” – Aleksey Charapko

Potential themes

Logs Compression/Search

• Drain: An Online Log Parsing Approach with Fixed Depth Tree (2017)
• Logzip: Extracting Hidden Structures via Iterative Clustering for Log Compression (2019)
• CLP: Efficient and Scalable Search on Compressed Text Logs (OSDI 2021)
• μSlope: High Compression and Fast Search on Semi-Structured Logs  (OSDI 2024)

Garbage collection

• A Unified Theory of Garbage Collection (2004) 
• Myths and Realities: The Performance Impact of Garbage Collection (2004)
• Garbage-First Garbage Collection (2004)
• Immix: A Mark-Region Garbage Collector with Space Efficiency, Fast Collection, and Mutator Performance (2008)
• Shenandoah: An open-source concurrent compacting GC for OpenJDK (2016)

• Deep Dive into ZGC: A Modern Garbage Collector in OpenJDK (2022)

• Low-Latency, High-Throughput Garbage Collection (2022)

Bandit Algorithms

• Parallelizing Exploration-Exploitation Tradeoffs with Gaussian Process Bandit Optimization (2012)
• Practical Bayesian Optimization of Machine Learning Algorithms (2012)
• High-Dimensional Gaussian Process Bandits (2013)
• Hyperband: A Novel Bandit-Based Approach to Hyperparameter Optimization (2016) 
• BOHB: Robust and Efficient Hyperparameter Optimization at Scale (2018) 

• Parallel Bayesian Optimization of Multiple Noisy Objectives with Expected Hypervolume Improvement (2021) 
• High-Dimensional Bayesian Optimization with Sparse Axis-Aligned Subspace (2021) 

Potential incomplete themes

Containerization

• Solaris Jails
• Dockers
• Rootless Docker

Blackbox optimizer algorithms

• TPE-CMAS
• GPyOpt
• SMAC3 - random forrest thing

Virtualization (continued)

• Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures - theory, but the Adams and agesen paper covers it too
• Memory Resource Management in VMware ESX Server - supposedly THE paper on memory overcommit
• SoK: Confidential Quartet - Comparison of Platforms for Virtualization-Based Confidential Computing - confidential computer virt

AutoML

• Amazon Sagemaker: A white box AutoML solution at scale (2020)

Authorization systems

• Role-Based Access Control* (1996)
• Macaroons: Cookies with Contextual Caveats for Decentralized Authorization in the Cloud (2014)
• Semantic-based Automated Reasoning for AWS Access Policies using SMT (2018)
• Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System (2019)

• Himeji: a scalable centralized system for authorization at Airbnb | by Alan Yao (medium)

• Edge Authentication and Token-Agnostic Identity Propagation (2021, Netflix, blog)
• Data Guard: A Fine-grained Purpose-based Access Control System for Large Data Warehouses (2025, Linkedin)

ML security

• Latte: Large-Scale Lateral Movement Detection
• Stateful Least Privilege Authorization for the Cloud (2024)
• Detecting Multi-Step IAM Attacks in AWS Environments via Model Checking (2023)

ML Ops and Deployment

• Owl: Scale and Flexibility in Distribution of Hot Content (2022)

Tabular Foundation Models

• Transformers Can Do Bayesian Inference (2021 Dec)
• TabPFN: A Transformer That Solves Small Tabular Classification Problems in a Second (2022 Jul)
• Accurate predictions on small data with a tabular foundation model | Nature (2025 Jan)
• Towards Benchmarking Foundation Models for Tabular Data With Text (2025 Jul)  
• Mitra: Mixed Synthetic Priors for Enhancing Tabular Foundation Models (2025 oct)

Linux Scheduling

• CFS 
• EEVDF

Chip-scale Computer Architecture

• The WaveScalar Architecture (2004)
• FACL: A Flexible and High-Performance ACL engine on FPGA-based SmartNIC (2022)
• Putting out the hardware dumpster fire (2023)

Warehouse-scale Computer Architecture

• Research and Technologies for next-generation high-temperature data centers (2023)
• Optimizing Resource Allocation in Hyperscale DCs: Scalability, Usability, and Experiences  (2024)

Simd vs Vector architectures

• Vector Architectures: Past, Present and Future (1998)
• The ARM Scalable Vector Extension (2018)
• ispc: A SPMD Compiler for High-Performance CPU Programming 

Serverless

• What Serverless Computing Is and Should Become (Article 2021) 
• Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing (2021)
• Serverless Computing: A Survey of Opportunities, Challenges, and Applications (2021)
• Sabre: Hardware-Accelerated Snapshot Compression for Serverless MicroVMs (2024)
• Function as a service

• Architectural Implications of Function-as-a-Service Computing (2019)

Networks

• The Click Modular Router (1999)
• WireGuard: Next Generation Kernel Network Tunnel
• Onix: a distributed control platform for large-scale production networks 
• [2210.00714] It's Time to Replace TCP in the Datacenter 
• WAN

• Jellyfish: Networking Data Centers Randomly
• Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Tradeoffs 
• BwE: Flexible, Hierarchical Bandwidth Allocation for WAN Distributed Computing (2015) 

File/block store

• Oxide 445 - Crucible Upstairs Backpressure / RFD / Oxide

• RFD 60 Storage Architecture Considerations

• What's the Story in EBS Glory: Evolutions and Lessons in Building Cloud Block Store

• IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System 
• The Zettabyte File System
• Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
• A Study of Linux File System Evolution
• WekaFS Architecture | WHITEPAPER 
• Object Storage on CRAQ High-throughput chain replication for read-mostly workloads 

Distributed Programs

• Piccolo: Building Fast, Distributed Programs with Partitioned Tables (2010)
• FlumeJava: Easy, Efficient Data-Parallel Pipelines (2010)
• CIEL: a universal execution engine for distributed data-flow computing (2011)
• Naiad: a timely dataflow system (2013)

Databases

• Comparisons

• An Empirical Evaluation of In-Memory Multi-Version Concurrency Control 
• Constructing and Analyzing the LSM Compaction Design Space 

• Spanner Lineage

• Online, Asynchronous Schema Change in F1 (2013)
• FoundationDB: A Distributed Unbundled Transactional Key Value Store (2021)
• CockroachDB: The Resilient Geo-Distributed SQL Database (2020)

• Specialized databases

• Monarch: Google's Planet-Scale In-Memory Time Series Database
• CliqueMap: Productionizing an RMA-Based Distributed Caching System 

• Learned

• SageDB: A Learned Database System
• Learned Indexes for a Google-scale Disk-based Database 

• Querying Planning

• Distributed join algorithms on thousands of cores (2017)
• How to Architect a Query Compiler, Revisited (2018) 
• DBSP: Automatic Incremental View Maintenance for Rich Query Languages

• Media

• Project Silica: Towards Sustainable Cloud Archival Storage in Glass 
• The five-minute rule twenty years later, and how flash memory changes the rules (2007) 

• Flash

• Kangaroo: Caching Billions of Tiny Objects on Flash 
• An Efficient Memory-Mapped Key-Value Store for Flash
• The unwritten contract of solid state drives
• WiscKey: Separating Keys from Values in SSD-conscious Storage 

• Analytics

• C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS
• Shark: SQL and Rich Analytics at Scale
• The Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse
• Building an Elastic Query Engine on Disaggregated Storage
• Druid: A Real-time Analytical Data Store at Scale

• Columnar encodings/formats

• Lance: Efficient Random Access in Columnar Storage through Adaptive Structural Encodings (2025)

• Key Value

• Dynamo: Amazon's highly available key-value store
• SplinterDB: A General-Purpose Key-Value Store for Fast Storage
• Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3
• ROLEX: A Scalable RDMA-oriented Learned Key-Value Store for Disaggregated Memory Systems
• Monkey: Optimal Navigable Key-Value Store | Stratos Idreos – LSM tree tuning

• Embeddable

• DuckDB: an Embeddable Analytical Database
• SQLite: Past, Present, and Future 
• Are you sure you want to use MMAP in your Database Management System?  

• Object store

• RADOS

Concurrency

• Fuss, Futexes and Furwocks: Fast Userlevel Locking in Linux (2003)

Distributed Tracing

• [2502.06318] Tracezip: Efficient Distributed Tracing via Trace Compression (2025)

Compressed Search

• Opportunistic data structures with applications (2000)
• Succinct: Enabling Queries on Compressed Data (2015)

Operating Systems

• Linux monitoring and eBPF

• An analysis of decay-usage scheduling in multiprocessors (1995)
• kvm: the Linux Virtual Machine Monitor (2007)
• BPF for storage: an exokernel-inspired approach (2021)
• BPF-OF Storage Function Pushdown over the network

• Non-linux kernels

• The multikernel: a new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems 
• SkyBridge: Fast and Secure Inter-Process Communication for Microkernels 
• Understanding Fuchsia Security 

• Plan 9 from Bell Labs 

L4 Microkernels

• Improving IPC by Kernel Design (1993)
• The Performance of µ-Kernel-Based Systems (1997)
• EROS: a fast capability system (1999)
• seL4: Formal Verification of an OS Kernel (2009)
• From L3 to seL4 What Have We Learnt in 20 Years of L4 Microkernels? (2013)

Memory Nonsense

• Far Memory redux

• Can Far Memory Improve Job Throughput? (2020) 
• MemLiner: Lining up Tracing and Application for a Far-Memory-Friendly Runtime (2022)
• A Case Against CXL Memory Pooling (2023)
• SWARM: Replicating Shared Disaggregated-Memory Data in No Time (2024) 
• UniMem: Redesigning Disaggregated Memory within A Unified Local-Remote Memory Hierarchy (2024)

• Compressed Memory

• The Case for Compressed Caching in Virtual Memory Systems (1999)
• Ariadne: A Hotness-Aware and Size-Adaptive Compressed Swap Technique for Fast Application Relaunch and Reduced CPU Usage on Mobile Devices (2025) 

• Non volatile Memory

• NV-Heaps: making persistent objects fast and safe with non-volatile memories (2011)
• Poseidon: Safe, Fast and Scalable Persistent Memory Allocator

• An allocator for non-volatile RAM

• Twizzler: a Data-Centric OS for Non-Volatile Memory ← GNN rec

• Memory Safety

• The CHERI capability model: Revisiting RISC in an age of risk (2014)
• CheriABI - Enforcing Valid Pointer Provenance and Minimizing Pointer Privilege in the POSIX C Run-time Environment (2019)
• Exploiting Android’s Hardened Memory Allocator

• Mallocs

• Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review (1995)
• malloc Implementation for FreeBSD
• Mimalloc: Free List Sharding in Action
• JeMalloc: A Scalable Concurrent malloc(3) Implementation for FreeBSD 
• Learning-based Memory Allocation for C++ Server Workloads

Control Flow Integrity

TODO, return oriented programming, backwards CFI, forwards CFI, vtable exploitation, coroutine exploitation

• Twenty years later: Evaluating the Adoption of Control Flow Integrity (2024)

Software Manufacturing (compile/link/build)

• swift/docs/ABI/CallingConvention.rst at main
• Mold Design Document: mold/docs/design.md · rui314/mold · GitHub
• All About Linkers (2017) - Linker overview
• 2016 EuroLLVM Developers' Meeting: R. Ueyama "New LLD linker for ELF" (optional) - LLD talk for LLVM
• LWN - 20 part linker essay
• Incremental Computation

Compilers

• Big list of papers: https://github.com/aalhour/awesome-compilers?tab=readme-ov-file 
• Halide: Decoupling Algorithms from Schedules for High-Performance Image Processing
• An Approach to a Compiler-Compiler
• Secrets of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler inliner
• How to make a fast curry: push/enter vs eval/apply

IRs and assembly

• The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer (1980) 
• ISSCC2018 - 50 Years of Computer Architecture:From Mainframe CPUs to Neural-Network TPUs 

• Machine Learning in Compiler Optimization (IEEE 2018) 
• The Correctness-Security Gap in Compiler Optimization

Differential Privacy

• The Staircase Mechanism in Differential Privacy 

Multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption

• Foundation

• 1992 - How to play ANY mental game (MPC turing machine)
• Somewhat Practical Fully Homomorphic Encryption 2012  

• Arithmetic

• Gentry 2010 - Fully Homomorphic Encryption Using Ideal Lattices 
• BGV 2011 - Fully Homomorphic Encryption without Bootstrapping 
• BFV 2012 - Somewhat Practical Fully Homomorphic Encryption 
• CKKV 2016 -  Homomorphic Encryption for Arithmetic of Approximate Numbers

• Boolean Circuits

• 003 TFHE Deep Dive w/ Ilaria Chillotti
• TFHE: Fast Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus? 

• Functions

• Pika: Secure Computation using Function Secret Sharing over Rings 
• Faster Homomorphic Discrete Fourier Transforms and Improved FHE Bootstrapping 

• Applications

• Protecting accounts from credential stuffing with password breach alerting 
• Scalable Private Search with Wally 
• Curl: Private LLMs through Wavelet-Encoded Look-Up Tables

Security

• The First 30 Years of Cryptographic Hash Functions and the NIST SHA-3 Competition
• SoK: Make JIT-Spray Great Again
• Site Isolation: Process Separation for Web Sites within the Browser (2019)
• Comparative Analysis of Cryptographic Key Management Systems 

Safety

• spam: The Underground on 140 Characters Or Less (2010)
• Suspended Accounts in Retrospect: An Analysis of Twitter Spam (2011) 

More Approximate Quantiles

• [1902.04023] Computing Extremely Accurate Quantiles Using t-Digests
• [2102.09299] Theory meets Practice at the Median: a worst case comparison of relative error quantile algorithms 

Misc Machine Learning

• Alpa: A System for Training Large Machine Learning Models Efficiently on Distributed Systems
• Unified Declarative Optimization for Machine Learning
• Hidden Technical Debt in Machine Learning Systems (2015)

Nix

• Nix: A Safe and Policy-Free System for Software Deployment (2004)

More RL

• [1911.08265] Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model 
• [1912.06680] Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning 
• AlphaStar (2019) 
• [2106.01345] Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling 
• [2106.02039] Offline Reinforcement Learning as One Big Sequence Modeling Problem 

Transformer architecture

• LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models 
• From Sparse to Soft Mixtures of Experts 
• Omni-SMoLA: Boosting Generalist Multimodal Models with Soft Mixture of Low-rank Experts 

LoRA

• LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models 
• Some intermediate papers that do adaptation with fewer and fewer params
• ​​Learning to Reason in 13 Parameters 

Context length extension

• TODO

ML Model Distillation

• TODO

Shadow Realm

These are potential topics that we decided to neither prioritize in the short term, nor to outright delete

• More details about the 2021-10-4 outage - Engineering at Meta
• PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library
• Kubernetes: The Documentary [PART 1]
• How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper
• Roblox’s cloud-native catastrophe: A post mortem | InfoWorld
• AWS Post-Event Summaries
• Weaving Relations for Cache Performance 
• Chris's Wiki :: blog/unix/SbrkVersusMmap 

• Prospec Annealing
• Borg Omega and Kuberntes
• The Glasgow Haskell Compiler
• ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method Supporting Fine-Granularity Locking and Partial Rollbacks Using Write-Ahead Logging (1992) 
• The design and implementation of a log-structured file system (1992)
• Debugging in the (very) large: ten years of implementation and experience (Windows PCs)

• Hubris / Oxide

• Blog post - Hubris and Humility
• Talk - On Hubris and Humility: developing an OS for robustness in Rust :: Open Source Firmware Conference 2021 :: pretalx

• 2017 swampUP Sessions | Distroless Docker: Containerizing Apps, not VMs - Matthew Moore
• Hypervisor-Enforced Kernel Integrity (Heki) for KVM - Mickaël Salaün, Mr Madhavan Venkataraman
• Linux sched-nice-design.txt 
• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Synchronization but Were Afraid to Ask        
• Space/time trade-offs in hash coding with allowable errors (1970)
• Summary Cache: A Scalable Wide-Area Web Cache Sharing Protocol (1998)
• Everything you always wanted to know about multicore graph processing but were afraid to ask (usenix best paper ‘17)
• VP8, an open source video codec for the web
• Simple Linear Works Suffix Array Construction
• Five Color Theorem
• Graph Isomorphism in Quasipolynomial Time

• TODO: we need warm up papers to get our graph theory up to par

• Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo – Hot reloading code in games
• A Deep Dive into Nanite Virtualized Geometry 
• Vectorized Production Path Tracing
• Binary formats: Flatbuffers/Protobufs/Captnproto
• Cornflakes
• Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation (2018)
• LightGCN: Simplifying and Powering Graph Convolution Network for Recommendation (2020)