A Periodic Table of System Design: 40+ Shared Principles

Georgia Tech researcher Joy Arulraj presents a cross-domain synthesis of recurring system design principles that typically get reinvented under different names in databases, operating systems, computer architecture, networking, distributed systems, and security. Inspired by Mendeleev's periodic table, the work reviews over 100 influential papers to extract abstract, generally applicable principles — showing, for example, how the 'consistency relaxation' seen in database isolation levels is the same underlying idea behind weakly ordered memory models and eventual-consistency protocols in distributed systems.

The resulting taxonomy organizes 40+ principles into eight thematic groups: Structure, Efficiency, Semantics, Distribution, Planning, Operability, Reliability, and Security. Each principle is tagged with a short symbol and framed around design intent rather than specific mechanisms — for instance, 'preserve correctness under concurrency' rather than a particular locking protocol. Concepts like simplicity, modularity, composability, extensibility, and policy/mechanism separation are grounded in classic systems such as Unix and the OSI model.

For engineers, this shared vocabulary makes it easier to compare design trade-offs across fields, reduces the need to relearn the same lessons in new contexts, and helps researchers position their contributions more precisely relative to prior work.