The plan is to discuss one or more of the topics listed below, but suggestions for other topics are welcome. The list below contains the papers we will cover in each topic.
RDMA

FaRM: Fast remote memory (NSDI'14)

No compromises: distributed transactions with consistency, availability, and performance (SOSP'15)

Fast In-memory Transaction Processing using RDMA and HTM (SOSP'15)

Fast and general distributed transactions using RDMA and HTM (EuroSys'16)

FaSST: Fast, Scalable and Simple Distributed Transactions with Two-Sided (RDMA) Datagram RPCs (OSDI'16)

The End of a Myth: Distributed Transactions Can Scale (VLDB'17)

Fast and Concurrent RDF Queries with RDMA-Based Distributed Graph Exploration (OSDI'16)

Multi-Core In-Memory Databases

Database Engines on Multicores, Why Parallelize When You Can Distribute? (EuroSys'11)

Speedy Transactions in Multicore In-Memory Databases (SOSP'13)

Phase Reconciliation for Contended In-Memory Transactions (OSDI'14)

Rethinking serializable multiversion concurrency control (VLDB'15)

Design Principles for Scaling Multi-core OLTP Under High Contention (SIGMOD'16)

High Performance Transactions via Early Write Visibility (VLDB'17)

Distributed Transactions

Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems (SIGMOD'12)

Building Consistent Transactions with Inconsistent Replication (SOSP'15)

Consolidating Concurrency Control and Consensus for Commits under Conflicts with Janus (OSDI'16)

Just Say NO to Paxos Overhead: Replacing Consensus with Network Ordering (OSDI'16)

Eris: Coordination-Free Consistent Transactions using Network Multi-Sequencing (SOSP'17)

Consistency in Distributed Systems

Transactional storage for geo-replicated systems (SOSP'11)

Don't Settle for Eventual: Causal Consistency for Wide-Area Storage with COPS (SOSP'11)

Stronger Semantics for Low-Latency Geo-Replicated Storage (NSDI'13)

I Can't Believe It's Not Causal! Scalable Causal Consistency with No Slowdown Cascades (NSDI'17)

The SNOW Theorem and Latency-Optimal Read-Only Transactions (OSDI'16)