A formal characterization of SI-based ROWA replication protocols

Snapshot isolation (SI) is commonly used in some commercial DBMSs with a multiversion concurrency control mechanism since it never blocks read-only transactions. Recent database replication protocols have been designed using SI replicas where transactions are firstly executed in a delegate replica and their updates (if any) are propagated to the rest of the replicas at commit time; i.e. they follow the Read One Write All (ROWA) approach. This paper provides a formalization that shows the correctness of abstract protocols which cover these replication proposals. These abstract protocols differ in the properties demanded for achieving a global SI level and those needed for its generalized SI (GSI) variant ¿ allowing reads from old snapshots. Additionally, we propose two more relaxed properties that also ensure a global GSI level. Thus, some applications can further optimize their performance in a replicated system while obtaining GSI. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The authors wish to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments that helped us to greatly improve the quality and readability of this paper. This work has been supported by the Spanish Government under research grant TIN2009-14460-C03. Besides, the authors wish to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments that helped us to greatly improve the quality and readability of this paper.Armendáriz-Iñigo, J.; Juárez-Rodríguez, J.; González De Mendívil, J.; Garitagoitia, J.; Irún Briz, L.; Muñoz Escoí, FD. (2011). A formal characterization of SI-based ROWA replication protocols. Data and Knowledge Engineering. 70(1):21-34. doi:10.1016/j.datak.2010.07.012S213470

Partial replication with strong consistency

In response to the increasing expectations of their clients, cloud services exploit geo-replication to provide fault-tolerance, availability and low latency when executing requests. However, cloud platforms tend to adopt weak consistency semantics, in which replicas may diverge in state independently. These systems offer good response times but at the disadvantage of allowing potential data inconsistencies that may affect user experience. Some systems propose to adopt solutions with strong consistency, which are not as efficient but simplify the development of correct applications by guaranteeing that all replicas in the system maintain the same database state. Therefore, it is interesting to explore a system that can offer strong consistency while minimizing its main disadvantage: the impact in performance that results from coordinating every replica in the system. A possible solution to reduce the cost of replica coordination is to support partial replication. Partially replicating a database allows for each server to only be responsible for a subset of the data - a partition - which means that when updating the database only some of replicas have to be synchronized, improving response times. In this dissertation, we propose an algorithm that implements a distributed replicated database that offers strong consistency with support for partial replication. To achieve strong consistency in a partially replicated scenario, our algorithm is in part based on the Clock-SI[10] research, which presents an algorithm that implements a multi-versioned database for strong consistency (snapshot-isolation) and performs the Two-Phase Commit protocol when coordinating replicas during updates. The algorithm is supported by an architecture that simplifies distributing partitions among datacenters and efficiently propagating operations across nodes in the same partition, thanks to the ChainPaxos[27] algorithm.Como forma de responder às expectativas cada vez maiores dos seus clientes, as operadoras cloud tiram partido da geo-replicação para oferecer tolerância a falhas, disponibilidade e baixa latência dos seus sistemas na resposta aos pedidos. No entanto, as plataformas cloud tendem a adotar uma semântica de consistência fraca, na qual as réplicas podem variar em estado de forma independente. Estes sistemas oferecem bons tempos de resposta mas com a desvantagem de que têm de lidar com potenciais inconsistências nos dados que podem ter impacto na experiência dos utilizadores. Alguns sistemas propõem adotar soluções com consistência forte, as quais não são tão eficientes mas simplificam o desenvolvimento de aplicações ao garantir que todas as réplicas do sistema mantêm o mesmo estado da base de dados. É então interessante explorar um sistema que garanta replicação forte mas que minimize a sua principal desvantagem: o impacto de performance no momento de coordenar o estado das réplicas nos sistema. Uma possível solução para reduzir o custo de coordenação das réplicas durante transações é o suporte à replicação parcial. Replicar parcialmente uma base de dados permite que cada servidor seja apenas responsável por uma parte dos dados - uma partição - o que significa que quando são realizadas escritas apenas algumas das réplicas têm de ser sincronizadas, melhorando os tempos de resposta. Neste trabalho propomos um algoritmo que implementa um sistema de armazenamento distríbuido replicado que oferece consistência forte com suporte a replicação parcial. A fim de garantir consistência forte num cenário de replicação parcial, o nosso algoritmo é em parte baseado no algoritmo Clock-SI[10], que implementa uma base de dados parcial com multi-versões para garantir consistência forte (snapshot-isolation) e que realiza o protocolo Two-Phase Commit para coordenar as réplicas no momento de aplicar escritas. O algoritmo é suportado por uma arquitectura que torna simples distribuir partições por vários centros de dados e propagar de forma eficiente operações entre todos os nós numa mesma partição, através do algoritmo ChainPaxos[27]

ReserveTM: Optimizing for Eager Software Transactional Memory

Software Transactional Memory (STM) helps programmers write correct concurrent code by allowing them to identify atomic sections rather than focusing on the mechanics of concurrency control. Given code with atomic sections, the compiler and STM runtime can work together to ensure proper controlled access to shared memory. STM runtimes use either lazy or eager version management. Lazy versioning buffers transaction updates, whereas eager versioning applies updates in-place. The current set of primitives suit lazy versioning since memory needs to be accessed through the runtime. We present a new set of runtime primitives that better suit eager versioned STM. We propose a novel extension to the compiler/runtime interface, consisting of memory reservations and memory releases. These extensions enable optimizations specific to eager versioned runtimes. A memory reservation allows a transaction to perform instrumentation-free access on a memory address. A release allows a read-only address to be modified by another transaction. Together, these reduce the instrumentation overhead required to support STM and improve concurrency between readers and writers. We have implemented these primitives and evaluated its performance on the STAMP benchmarks. Our results show strong performance and scalability improvements to eager versioned algorithms

On the Semantics of Snapshot Isolation

Snapshot isolation (SI) is a standard transactional consistency model used in databases, distributed systems and software transactional memory (STM). Its semantics is formally defined both declaratively as an acyclicity axiom, and operationally as a concurrent algorithm with memory bearing timestamps. We develop two simpler equivalent operational definitions of SI as lock-based reference implementations that do not use timestamps. Our first locking implementation is prescient in that requires a priori knowledge of the data accessed by a transaction and carries out transactional writes eagerly (in-place). Our second implementation is non-prescient and performs transactional writes lazily by recording them in a local log and propagating them to memory at commit time. Whilst our first implementation is simpler and may be better suited for developing a program logic for SI transactions, our second implementation is more practical due to its non-prescience. We show that both implementations are sound and complete against the declarative SI specification and thus yield equivalent operational definitions for SI. We further consider, for the first time formally, the use of SI in a context with racy non-transactional accesses, as can arise in STM implementations of SI. We introduce robust snapshot isolation (RSI), an adaptation of SI with similar semantics and guarantees in this mixed setting. We present a declarative specification of RSI as an acyclicity axiom and analogously develop two operational models as lock-based reference implementations (one eager, one lazy). We show that these operational models are both sound and complete against the declarative RSI model

Performance Optimizations for Software Transactional Memory

The transition from single-core processors to multi-core processors demands a change from sequential programming to concurrent programming for mainstream programmers. However, concurrent programming has long been widely recognized as being notoriously difficult. A major reason for its difficulty is that existing concurrent programming constructs provide low-level programming abstractions. Using these constructs forces programmers to consider many low level details. Locks, the dominant programming construct for mutual exclusion, suffer several well known problems, such as deadlock, priority inversion, and convoying, and are directly related to the difficulty of concurrent programming. The alternative to locks, i.e. non-blocking programming, not only is extremely error-prone, but also does not produce consistently good performance. Better programming constructs are critical to reduce the complexity of concurrent programming, increase productivity, and expose the computing power in multi-core processors. Transactional memory has emerged recently as one promising programming construct for supporting atomic operations on shared data. By eliminating the need to consider a huge number of possible interactions among concurrent transactions, Transactional memory greatly reduces the complexity of concurrent programming and vastly improves programming productivity. Software transactional memory systems implement a transactional memory abstraction in software. Unfortunately, existing designs of Software Transactional Memory systems incur significant performance overhead that could potentially prevent it from being widely used. Reducing STM's overhead will be critical for mainstream programmers to improve productivity while not suffering performance degradation. My thesis is that the performance of STM can be significantly improved by intelligently designing validation and commit protocols, by designing the time base, and by incorporating application-specific knowledge. I present four novel techniques for improving performance of STM systems to support my thesis. First, I propose a time-based STM system based on a runtime tuning strategy that is able to deliver performance equal to or better than existing strategies. Second, I present several novel commit phase designs and evaluate their performance. Then I propose a new STM programming interface extension that enables transaction optimizations using fast shared memory reads while maintaining transaction composability. Next, I present a distributed time base design that outperforms existing time base designs for certain types of STM applications. Finally, I propose a novel programming construct to support multi-place isolation. Experimental results show the techniques presented here can significantly improve the STM performance. We expect these techniques to help STM be accepted by more programmers

Optimizing recovery protocols for replicated database systems

En la actualidad, el uso de tecnologías de informacíon y sistemas de cómputo tienen una gran influencia en la vida diaria. Dentro de los sistemas informáticos actualmente en uso, son de gran relevancia los sistemas distribuidos por la capacidad que pueden tener para escalar, proporcionar soporte para la tolerancia a fallos y mejorar el desempeño de aplicaciones y proporcionar alta disponibilidad. Los sistemas replicados son un caso especial de los sistemas distribuidos. Esta tesis está centrada en el área de las bases de datos replicadas debido al uso extendido que en el presente se hace de ellas, requiriendo características como: bajos tiempos de respuesta, alto rendimiento en los procesos, balanceo de carga entre las replicas, consistencia e integridad de datos y tolerancia a fallos. En este contexto, el desarrollo de aplicaciones utilizando bases de datos replicadas presenta dificultades que pueden verse atenuadas mediante el uso de servicios de soporte a mas bajo nivel tales como servicios de comunicacion y pertenencia. El uso de los servicios proporcionados por los sistemas de comunicación de grupos permiten ocultar los detalles de las comunicaciones y facilitan el diseño de protocolos de replicación y recuperación. En esta tesis, se presenta un estudio de las alternativas y estrategias empleadas en los protocolos de replicación y recuperación en las bases de datos replicadas. También se revisan diferentes conceptos sobre los sistemas de comunicación de grupos y sincronia virtual. Se caracterizan y clasifican diferentes tipos de protocolos de replicación con respecto a la interacción o soporte que pudieran dar a la recuperación, sin embargo el enfoque se dirige a los protocolos basados en sistemas de comunicación de grupos. Debido a que los sistemas comerciales actuales permiten a los programadores y administradores de sistemas de bases de datos renunciar en alguna medida a la consistencia con la finalidad de aumentar el rendimiento, es importante determinar el nivel de consistencia necesario. En el caso de las bases de datos replicadas la consistencia está muy relacionada con el nivel de aislamiento establecido entre las transacciones. Una de las propuestas centrales de esta tesis es un protocolo de recuperación para un protocolo de replicación basado en certificación. Los protocolos de replicación de base de datos basados en certificación proveen buenas bases para el desarrollo de sus respectivos protocolos de recuperación cuando se utiliza el nivel de aislamiento snapshot. Para tal nivel de aislamiento no se requiere que los readsets sean transferidos entre las réplicas ni revisados en la fase de cetificación y ya que estos protocolos mantienen un histórico de la lista de writesets que es utilizada para certificar las transacciones, este histórico provee la información necesaria para transferir el estado perdido por la réplica en recuperación. Se hace un estudio del rendimiento del protocolo de recuperación básico y de la versión optimizada en la que se compacta la información a transferir. Se presentan los resultados obtenidos en las pruebas de la implementación del protocolo de recuperación en el middleware de soporte. La segunda propuesta esta basada en aplicar el principio de compactación de la informacion de recuperación en un protocolo de recuperación para los protocolos de replicación basados en votación débil. El objetivo es minimizar el tiempo necesario para transfeir y aplicar la información perdida por la réplica en recuperación obteniendo con esto un protocolo de recuperación mas eficiente. Se ha verificado el buen desempeño de este algoritmo a través de una simulación. Para efectuar la simulación se ha hecho uso del entorno de simulación Omnet++. En los resultados de los experimentos puede apreciarse que este protocolo de recuperación tiene buenos resultados en múltiples escenarios. Finalmente, se presenta la verificación de la corrección de ambos algoritmos de recuperación en el Capítulo 5.Nowadays, information technology and computing systems have a great relevance on our lives. Among current computer systems, distributed systems are one of the most important because of their scalability, fault tolerance, performance improvements and high availability. Replicated systems are a specific case of distributed system. This Ph.D. thesis is centered in the replicated database field due to their extended usage, requiring among other properties: low response times, high throughput, load balancing among replicas, data consistency, data integrity and fault tolerance. In this scope, the development of applications that use replicated databases raises some problems that can be reduced using other fault-tolerant building blocks, as group communication and membership services. Thus, the usage of the services provided by group communication systems (GCS) hides several communication details, simplifying the design of replication and recovery protocols. This Ph.D. thesis surveys the alternatives and strategies being used in the replication and recovery protocols for database replication systems. It also summarizes different concepts about group communication systems and virtual synchrony. As a result, the thesis provides a classification of database replication protocols according to their support to (and interaction with) recovery protocols, always assuming that both kinds of protocol rely on a GCS. Since current commercial DBMSs allow that programmers and database administrators sacrifice consistency with the aim of improving performance, it is important to select the appropriate level of consistency. Regarding (replicated) databases, consistency is strongly related to the isolation levels being assigned to transactions. One of the main proposals of this thesis is a recovery protocol for a replication protocol based on certification. Certification-based database replication protocols provide a good basis for the development of their recovery strategies when a snapshot isolation level is assumed. In that level readsets are not needed in the validation step. As a result, they do not need to be transmitted to other replicas. Additionally, these protocols hold a writeset list that is used in the certification/validation step. That list maintains the set of writesets needed by the recovery protocol. This thesis evaluates the performance of a recovery protocol based on the writeset list tranfer (basic protocol) and of an optimized version that compacts the information to be transferred. The second proposal applies the compaction principle to a recovery protocol designed for weak-voting replication protocols. Its aim is to minimize the time needed for transferring and applying the writesets lost by the recovering replica, obtaining in this way an efficient recovery. The performance of this recovery algorithm has been checked implementing a simulator. To this end, the Omnet++ simulating framework has been used. The simulation results confirm that this recovery protocol provides good results in multiple scenarios. Finally, the correction of both recovery protocols is also justified and presented in Chapter 5.García Muñoz, LH. (2013). Optimizing recovery protocols for replicated database systems [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/31632TESI

Towards lightweight and high-performance hardware transactional memory

Conventional lock-based synchronization serializes accesses to critical sections guarded by the same lock. Using multiple locks brings the possibility of a deadlock or a livelock in the program, making parallel programming a difficult task. Transactional Memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for parallel programming, offering an alternative to lock-based synchronization. TM eliminates the risk of deadlocks and livelocks, while it provides the desirable semantics of Atomicity, Consistency, and Isolation of critical sections. TM speculatively executes a series of memory accesses as a single, atomic, transaction. The speculative changes of a transaction are kept private until the transaction commits. If a transaction can break the atomicity or cause a deadlock or livelock, the TM system aborts the transaction and rolls back the speculative changes. To be effective, a TM implementation should provide high performance and scalability. While implementations of TM in pure software (STM) do not provide desirable performance, Hardware TM (HTM) implementations introduce much smaller overhead and have relatively good scalability, due to their better control of hardware resources. However, many HTM systems support only the transactions that fit limited hardware resources (for example, private caches), and fall back to software mechanisms if hardware limits are reached. These HTM systems, called best-effort HTMs, are not desirable since they force a programmer to think in terms of hardware limits, to use both HTM and STM, and to manage concurrent transactions in HTM and STM. In contrast with best-effort HTMs, unbounded HTM systems support overflowed transactions, that do not fit into private caches. Unbounded HTM systems often require complex protocols or expensive hardware mechanisms for conflict detection between overflowed transactions. In addition, an execution with overflowed transactions is often much slower than an execution that has only regular transactions. This is typically due to restrictive or approximative conflict management mechanism used for overflowed transactions. In this thesis, we study hardware implementations of transactional memory, and make three main contributions. First, we improve the general performance of HTM systems by proposing a scalable protocol for conflict management. The protocol has precise conflict detection, in contrast with often-employed inexact Bloom-filter-based conflict detection, which often falsely report conflicts between transactions. Second, we propose a best-effort HTM that utilizes the new scalable conflict detection protocol, termed EazyHTM. EazyHTM allows parallel commits for all non-conflicting transactions, and generally simplifies transaction commits. Finally, we propose an unbounded HTM that extends and improves the initial protocol for conflict management, and we name it EcoTM. EcoTM features precise conflict detection, and it efficiently supports large as well as small and short transactions. The key idea of EcoTM is to leverage an observation that very few locations are actually conflicting, even if applications have high contention. In EcoTM, each core locally detects if a cache line is non-conflicting, and conflict detection mechanism is invoked only for the few potentially conflicting cache lines.La Sincronización tradicional basada en los cerrojos de exclusión mutua (locks) serializa los accesos a las secciones críticas protegidas este cerrojo. La utilización de varios cerrojos en forma concurrente y/o paralela aumenta la posibilidad de entrar en abrazo mortal (deadlock) o en un bloqueo activo (livelock) en el programa, está es una de las razones por lo cual programar en forma paralela resulta ser mucho mas dificultoso que programar en forma secuencial. La memoria transaccional (TM) es un paradigma prometedor para la programación paralela, que ofrece una alternativa a los cerrojos. La memoria transaccional tiene muchas ventajas desde el punto de vista tanto práctico como teórico. TM elimina el riesgo de bloqueo mutuo y de bloqueo activo, mientras que proporciona una semántica de atomicidad, coherencia, aislamiento con características similares a las secciones críticas. TM ejecuta especulativamente una serie de accesos a la memoria como una transacción atómica. Los cambios especulativos de la transacción se mantienen privados hasta que se confirma la transacción. Si una transacción entra en conflicto con otra transacción o sea que alguna de ellas escribe en una dirección que la otra leyó o escribió, o se entra en un abrazo mortal o en un bloqueo activo, el sistema de TM aborta la transacción y revierte los cambios especulativos. Para ser eficaz, una implementación de TM debe proporcionar un alto rendimiento y escalabilidad. Las implementaciones de TM en el software (STM) no proporcionan este desempeño deseable, en cambio, las mplementaciones de TM en hardware (HTM) tienen mejor desempeño y una escalabilidad relativamente buena, debido a su mejor control de los recursos de hardware y que la resolución de los conflictos así el mantenimiento y gestión de los datos se hace en hardware. Sin embargo, muchos de los sistemas de HTM están limitados a los recursos de hardware disponibles, por ejemplo el tamaño de las caches privadas, y dependen de mecanismos de software para cuando esos límites son sobrepasados. Estos sistemas HTM, llamados best-effort HTM no son deseables, ya que obligan al programador a pensar en términos de los límites existentes en el hardware que se esta utilizando, así como en el sistema de STM que se llama cuando los recursos son sobrepasados. Además, tiene que resolver que transacciones hardware y software se ejecuten concurrentemente. En cambio, los sistemas de HTM ilimitados soportan un numero de operaciones ilimitadas o sea no están restringidos a límites impuestos artificialmente por el hardware, como ser el tamaño de las caches o buffers internos. Los sistemas HTM ilimitados por lo general requieren protocolos complejos o mecanismos muy costosos para la detección de conflictos y el mantenimiento de versiones de los datos entre las transacciones. Por otra parte, la ejecución de transacciones es a menudo mucho más lenta que en una ejecución sobre un sistema de HTM que este limitado. Esto es debido al que los mecanismos utilizados en el HTM limitado trabaja con conjuntos de datos relativamente pequeños que caben o están muy cerca del núcleo del procesador. En esta tesis estudiamos implementaciones de TM en hardware. Presentaremos tres contribuciones principales: Primero, mejoramos el rendimiento general de los sistemas, al proponer un protocolo escalable para la gestión de conflictos. El protocolo detecta los conflictos de forma precisa, en contraste con otras técnicas basadas en filtros Bloom, que pueden reportar conflictos falsos entre las transacciones. Segundo, proponemos un best-effort HTM que utiliza el nuevo protocolo escalable detección de conflictos, denominado EazyHTM. EazyHTM permite la ejecución completamente paralela de todas las transacciones sin conflictos, y por lo general simplifica la ejecución. Por último, proponemos una extensión y mejora del protocolo inicial para la gestión de conflictos, que llamaremos EcoTM. EcoTM cuenta con detección de conflictos precisa, eficiente y es compatible tanto con transacciones grandes como con pequeñas. La idea clave de EcoTM es aprovechar la observación que en muy pocas ubicaciones de memoria aparecen los conflictos entre las transacciones, incluso en aplicaciones tienen muchos conflictos. En EcoTM, cada núcleo detecta localmente si la línea es conflictiva, además existe un mecanismo de detección de conflictos detallado que solo se activa para las pocas líneas de memoria que son potencialmente conflictivas