

Comet: An active distributed key-value store  - systems_we_make
http://www.systemswemake.com/papers/comet-key-value-store

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akx
What is up with this naming thing anyway? Comet is a pretty well established
term... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming)>

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asymptotic
The name is rather unfortunate, but the project is quite interesting. I had no
idea Vuze, which used to be Azureus, had re-packaged itself as an abstracted
DHT provider.

I'm disappointed the author chose to tightly couple their implementation to
Vuze. What if an operator wanted to use the system on a private network of
machines? Why not implement the functionality using a Kademlia library
instead?

Finally, I'm extremely disappointed at the lack of openness in this paper, and
indeed in all papers on Systems We Make. The lack of reproducibility in
computational sciences is a current problem and I'd like to see more
researchers attempt to be more open about sharing not only their code but also
their setup. i.e.

<http://www.reproducibleresearch.org/>

"An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the
scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual
scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete
set of instructions which generated the figures." --D. Donoho

Although I agree that a research paper, if it included all the minutae
required to reproduce the results on a new system, would be far to verbose,
it's time researcers woke up and realised what the "scientific" part of
"scientific research" means. In my mind, the bare minimum of detail would be:

\- all the source code and build environment tools on a easy-to-access
repository, e.g. GitHub. \- all raw data numbers available in CSV files. \-
all source code used to generate pictorial graphs as the source code to R
scripts, or your favourite stats package.

This isn't rocket science. If you need more help figuring this out consider
reading:

<http://reproducibleresearch.net/index.php/How_to>

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vicngtor
Naming your product after a really popular internet technique is possibly the
stupidest idea I have heard in a while.

Did the author even check Comet in the programming world?

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systems_we_make
asymptotic! One another opinion I came across recently is this -
[http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/02/11/taking-
scientific-...](http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/02/11/taking-scientific-
publishing-to-the-next-level/)

