Electronic Voting Service Using Block-Chain

Cryptocurrency, and its underlying technologies, has been gaining popularity for transaction management beyond financial transactions. Transaction information is maintained in the block-chain, which can be used to audit the integrity of the transaction. The focus on this paper is the potential availability of block-chain technology of other transactional uses. Block-chain is one of the most stable open ledgers that preserves transaction information, and is difficult to forge. Since the information stored in block-chain is not related to personally identify information, it has the characteristics of anonymity. Also, the block-chain allows for transparent transaction verification since all information in the block-chain is open to the public. These characteristics are the same as the requirements for a voting system. That is, strong robustness, anonymity, and transparency. In this paper, we propose an electronic voting system as an application of block-chain, and describe block-chain based voting at a national level through examples

It Takes Two: Instrumenting the Interaction between In-Memory Databases and Solid-State Drives

In-memory databases rely on non-volatile storage devices for services such as durability and recovery. SSDs can provide the high-performance these services require. When performance problems occur, however, SSDs offer no mechanism to help analyze them. The only alternative is to instrument the database side of the problem and conjecture about what might be the cause of performance degradation. In this paper, we show that SSDs can in fact produce performance profiling information. We extend the Cosmos+OpenSSD, a full-edged SSD with open-source firmware, to track performance information on a per-IO-request granularity. We use such information, for instance, to analyze the interaction between a modern transaction log and checkpoint workloads, offering explanations to problems that were quite obscure before. We believe that an SSD providing such level of instrumentation is an essential tool towards co-designing a new class of high-performance storage/database stack