Reading List on Scalability

Scalability is one of the most important yet illusive entities in distributed computing. As Werner Vogels said (2nd Link), Scalability can never be a after-thought. If one need a system to be scalable, he needs to design for it, and he needs to design well.

I am not going to define scalability here, following are couple of papers which might shed light on the topic. If one is interesting in distributed systems,IMHO first paper is a Must Read.

1. Scale in distributed systems, B. Clifford Neuman. In Readings in Distributed Computing Systems, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1994.
2. Characteristics of scalability and their impact on performance, Bondi, A. B. 2000. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Workshop on Software and Performance (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). WOSP '00. ACM, New York, NY, 195-203. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/350391.350432
3. Evaluating the Scalability of Distributed Systems, Prasad Jogalekar, Murray Woodside, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems ,vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 589-603, June, 2000.
4. The Scalability Revolution: From Dead End to Open Road,Nati Shalom, white paper Gigaspaces

And couple of web links

1. A Word on Scalability - All Things Distributed
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability
3. Performance and Scalability