Research from Meta

All Publications

November 4, 2013
Qi Huang, Ken Birman, Robbert van Renesse, Wyatt Lloyd, Sanjeev Kumar, Harry Li

This paper examines the workload of Facebook’s photo-serving stack and the effectiveness of the many layers of caching it employs. Facebook’s image-management infrastructure is complex and geographically distributed. It includes browser caches on end-user systems, Edge Caches at ~20 PoPs, an Origin Cache, and for some kinds of images, additional caching via Akamai. The underlying image storage layer is widely distributed, and includes multiple data centers.

August 27, 2013
Lior Abraham, John Allen, Oleksandr Barykin, Vinayak Borkar, Bhuwan Chopra, Ciprian Gerea, Dan Merl, Josh Metzler, David Reiss, Subbu Subramanian, Janet Wiener, Okay Zed

Facebook takes performance monitoring seriously. Performance issues can impact over one billion users so we track thousands of servers, hundreds of PB of daily network traffic, hundreds of daily code...

August 26, 2013
Mike Curtiss, Iain Becker, Tudor Bosman, Sergey Doroshenko, Lucian Adrian Grijincu, Tom Jackson, Sandhya Kunnatur, Soren Lassen, Philip Pronin, Sriram Sankar, Guanghao Shen, Gintaras Woss, Chao Yang, Ning Zhang

Unicorn is an online, in-memory social graph-aware indexing system designed to search trillions of edges between tens of billions of users and entities on thousands of...

August 26, 2013
Maheshwaran Sathiamoorthy, Megasthenis Asteris, Dimitris Papailiopoulos, Alexandros G. Dimakis, Ramkumar Vadali, Scott Chen, Dhruba Borthakur

Distributed storage systems for large clusters typically use replication to provide reliability. Recently, erasure codes have been used to reduce the large storage overhead of three-replicated systems. Reed-Solomon codes are the standard design choice and their high repair cost is often considered an unavoidable price to pay for high storage efficiency and high reliability.

August 22, 2013
Qifan Wang, Dan Zhang, Luo Si

Similarity search, or finding approximate nearest neighbors, is an important technique for many applications. Many recent research demonstrate that hashing methods can achieve promising results for large scale similarity search due to its computational and memory efficiency.

August 22, 2013
Xianglong Liu, Junfeng He, Bo Lang

Recent years have witnessed the success of hashing techniques in approximate nearest neighbor search. In practice, multiple hash tables are usually employed to retrieve more desired results from all hit buckets of each table. However, there are rare works studying the unified approach to constructing multiple informative hash tables except the widely used random way.

August 11, 2013
Johan Ugander, Brian Karrer, Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg

A drawback with A/B testing is that it is poorly suited for experiments involving social interference, when the treatment of individuals spills over to neighboring individuals along an underlying social network. In this work, we propose a novel methodology using graph clustering to analyze average treatment effects under social interference.