Meta Research

Sharding is widely used to scale an application. Despite a decade of effort to build generic sharding frameworks that can...

In this monthly interview series, we turn the spotlight on members of the academic community and the important research they...

Facebook's Academic of the Month for May is Visiting Scientist Tianyin Xu from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Virtualizing consensus in Delos for rapid upgrades and happy engineers - Meta Research Virtualizing consensus in Delos for rapid upgrades and happy engineers - Meta Research Meta Research...

Our expert teams of Facebook scientists and engineers work quickly and collaboratively to solve some of the world’s most complex...

Building a ubiquitous shared infrastructure using Twine - Meta Research Building a ubiquitous shared infrastructure using Twine - Meta Research Meta Research...

We present Twine, Facebook’s cluster management system which has been running in production for the past decade. Twine has helped convert our infrastructure from a collection of siloed pools of customized machines dedicated to individual workloads, into a large-scale shared infrastructure with fungible hardware.

This paper introduces FlightTracker, a family of APIs and systems which now manage consistency for online access to Facebook’s graph. FlightTracker implicitly provides RYW and can be explicitly used to provide alternative consistency guarantees for special use cases; it enables flexible communication patterns between caches, which we have found important as the number of datacenters increases; it extends the same consistency guarantees to cross-shard indexes and materialized views, allowing us to transparently optimize queries; and it provides a uniform primitive for clients to obtain desired consistency guarantees across a variety of data stores.

Consensus-based replicated systems are complex, monolithic, and difficult to upgrade once deployed. As a result, deployed systems do not benefit from innovative research, and new consensus protocols rarely reach production. We propose virtualizing consensus by virtualizing the shared log API, allowing services to change consensus protocols without downtime.

Partnering with university faculty helps us drive impactful, innovative solutions to real-world technology challenges. From collaborations to funding research through...