Paper #: Week 10 Paper 18
Title: Free Transactions with Rio Vista

(1) Problems
This article addresses the problem of standard recoverable memories incurring an overhead of several  milliseconds per transaction. The authors suggest a combined solution to the problem via Rio Vista. Rio is a file cache and Vista is a recoverable memory library which is built for Rio. THe authors present these Rio Vista in this paper and also discuss the results. The authors claim that Rio Vista improves transaction overhead by a factor of 2000. 

  
(2) New Idea and Strengths
- This paper is well written. It discusses in pretty easy to understand language Rio and Vista. 
- The readers are kept interested not only by the idea and the performance benefits the paper provides but also by making it easy to follow. Diagrams and graphs are used towards this goal.
- The authors not only provide a description of their system but also supply experimental results which back up their claims. The results are very impressive.
- The speedup of 150-556x that Rio Vista achieves for standard benchmarks like TPC-B and TPC-C is extremely impressive.
- Another important benefit is that Rio is compatible with memory libraries other that Vista too. 


(3) Weaknesses and Extensions
- Most of the results are in comparison with RVM. Though the authors say that only RVM is close to their work but results with others would also be important to compare. We see that speedup with RVM is much lower than with Vista - similarly the authors should document results with other libraries too.
- The authors say that the factor of 2000 is possible for working sets that fit in the main memory. They do not talk about the conditions when the working set is larger than the main memory.
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