Maintaining consistency in distributed systems

In systems designed as assemblies of independently developed components, concurrent access to data or data structures normally arises within individual programs, and is controlled using mutual exclusion constructs, such as semaphores and monitors. Where data is persistent and/or sets of operation are related to one another, transactions or linearizability may be more appropriate. Systems that incorporate cooperative styles of distributed execution often replicate or distribute data within groups of components. In these cases, group oriented consistency properties must be maintained, and tools based on the virtual synchrony execution model greatly simplify the task confronting an application developer. All three styles of distributed computing are likely to be seen in future systems - often, within the same application. This leads us to propose an integrated approach that permits applications that use virtual synchrony with concurrent objects that respect a linearizability constraint, and vice versa. Transactional subsystems are treated as a special case of linearizability

Improving the benefits of multicast prioritization algorithms

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11227-014-1087-zPrioritized atomic multicast consists in delivering messages in total order while ensuring that the priorities of the messages are considered; i.e., messages with higher priorities are delivered first. That service can be used in multiple applications. An example is the usage of prioritization algorithms for reducing the transaction abort rates in applications that use a replicated database system. To this end, transaction messages get priorities according to their probability of violating the existing integrity constraints. This paper evaluates how that abort reduction may be improved varying the message sending rate and the bounds set on the length of the priority reordering queue being used by those multicast algorithms.This work has been partially supported by EU FEDER and Spanish MICINN under research Grants TIN2009-14460-C03-01 and TIN2010-17193.Miedes De Elías, EP.; Muñoz Escoí, FD. (2014). Improving the benefits of multicast prioritization algorithms. Journal of Supercomputing. 68(3):1280-1301. doi:10.1007/s11227-014-1087-zS12801301683Amir Y, Danilov C, Stanton JR (2000) A low latency, loss tolerant architecture and protocol for wide area group communication. In: International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), IEEE-CS, Washington, DC, USA, pp 327–336Chockler G, Keidar I, Vitenberg R (2001) Group communication specifications: a comprehensive study. ACM Comput Surv 33(4):427–469CiA (2001) About CAN in Automation (CiA). http://www.can-cia.org/index.php?id=aboutciaDéfago X, Schiper A, Urbán P (2004) Total order broadcast and multicast algorithms: taxonomy and survey. ACM Comput Surv 36(4):372–421Dolev D, Dwork C, Stockmeyer L (1987) On the minimal synchronism needed for distributed consensus. J ACM 34(1):77–97International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (1993) Road vehicles—interchange of digital information—controller area network (CAN) for high-speed communication. Revised by ISO 11898-1:2003JBoss (2011) The Netty project 3.2 user guide. http://docs.jboss.org/netty/3.2/guide/html/Kaashoek MF, Tanenbaum AS (1996) An evaluation of the Amoeba group communication system. In: International conference on distributed computing system (ICDCS), IEEE-CS, Washington, DC, USA, pp 436–448Miedes E, Muñoz-Escoí FD (2008) Managing priorities in atomic multicast protocols. In: International conference on availability, reliability and security (ARES), Barcelona, Spain, pp 514–519Miedes E, Muñoz-Escoí FD (2010) Dynamic switching of total-order broadcast protocols. In: International conference on parallel and distributed processing techniques and applications (PDPTA), CSREA Press, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, pp 457–463Miedes E, Muñoz-Escoí FD, Decker H (2008) Reducing transaction abort rates with prioritized atomic multicast protocols. In: International European conference on parallel and distributed computing (Euro-Par), Springer, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, Lecture notes in computer science, vol 5168, pp 394–403Mocito J, Rodrigues L (2006) Run-time switching between total order algorithms. In: International European conference on parallel and distributed computing (Euro-Par), Springer, Dresden, Germany, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4128, pp 582–591Moser LE, Melliar-Smith PM, Agarwal DA, Budhia R, Lingley-Papadopoulos C (1996) Totem: a fault-tolerant multicast group communication system. Commun ACM 39(4):54–63Nakamura A, Takizawa M (1992) Priority-based total and semi-total ordering broadcast protocols. In: International conference on distributed computing systems (ICDCS), Yokohama, Japan, pp 178–185Nakamura A, Takizawa M (1993) Starvation-prevented priority based total ordering broadcast protocol on high-speed single channel network. In: 2nd International symposium on high performance distributed computing (HPDC), pp 281–288Rodrigues L, Veríssimo P, Casimiro A (1995) Priority-based totally ordered multicast. In: Workshop on algorithms and architectures for real-time control (AARTC), Ostend, BelgiumRütti O, Wojciechowski P, Schiper A (2006) Structural and algorithmic issues of dynamic protocol update. In: 20th International parallel and distributed processing symposium (IPDPS), IEEE-CS Press, Rhodes Island, GreeceTindell K, Clark J (1994) Holistic schedulability analysis for distributed hard real-time systems. Microprocess Microprogr 40(2–3):117–134Tully A, Shrivastava SK (1990) Preventing state divergence in replicated distributed programs. In: International symposium on reliable distributed systems (SRDS), Huntsville, Alabama, USA, pp 104–113Wiesmann M, Schiper A (2005) Comparison of database replication techniques based on total order broadcast. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 17(4):551–56

A Survey of Fault-Tolerance and Fault-Recovery Techniques in Parallel Systems

Supercomputing systems today often come in the form of large numbers of commodity systems linked together into a computing cluster. These systems, like any distributed system, can have large numbers of independent hardware components cooperating or collaborating on a computation. Unfortunately, any of this vast number of components can fail at any time, resulting in potentially erroneous output. In order to improve the robustness of supercomputing applications in the presence of failures, many techniques have been developed to provide resilience to these kinds of system faults. This survey provides an overview of these various fault-tolerance techniques.Comment: 11 page

Scalability approaches for causal multicast: a survey

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00607-015-0479-0Many distributed services need to be scalable: internet search, electronic commerce, e-government... In order to achieve scalability, high availability and fault tolerance, such applications rely on replicated components. Because of the dynamics of growth and volatility of customer markets, applications need to be hosted by adaptive, highly scalable systems. In particular, the scalability of the reliable multicast mechanisms used for supporting the consistency of replicas is of crucial importance. Reliable multicast might propagate updates in a pre-determined order (e.g., FIFO, total or causal). Since total order needs more communication rounds than causal order, the latter appears to be the preferable candidate for achieving multicast scalability, although the consistency guarantees based on causal order are weaker than those of total order. 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Optimistic total order in wide area networks

Total order multicast greatly simplifies the implementa- tion of fault-tolerant services using the replicated state ma- chine approach. The additional latency of total ordering can be masked by taking advantage of spontaneous order- ing observed in LANs: A tentative delivery allows the ap- plication to proceed in parallel with the ordering protocol. The effectiveness of the technique rests on the optimistic as- sumption that a large share of correctly ordered tentative deliveries offsets the cost of undoing the effect of mistakes. This paper proposes a simple technique which enables the usage of optimistic delivery also in WANs with much larger transmission delays where the optimistic assumption does not normally hold. Our proposal exploits local clocks and the stability of network delays to reduce the mistakes in the ordering of tentative deliveries. An experimental evalu- ation of a modified sequencer-based protocol is presented, illustrating the usefulness of the approach in fault-tolerant database management

Issues in providing a reliable multicast facility

Issues involved in point-to-multipoint communication are presented and the literature for proposed solutions and approaches surveyed. Particular attention is focused on the ideas and implementations that align with the requirements of the environment of interest. The attributes of multicast receiver groups that might lead to useful classifications, what the functionality of a management scheme should be, and how the group management module can be implemented are examined. The services that multicasting facilities can offer are presented, followed by mechanisms within the communications protocol that implements these services. The metrics of interest when evaluating a reliable multicast facility are identified and applied to four transport layer protocols that incorporate reliable multicast

A Dual Digraph Approach for Leaderless Atomic Broadcast (Extended Version)

Many distributed systems work on a common shared state; in such systems, distributed agreement is necessary for consistency. With an increasing number of servers, these systems become more susceptible to single-server failures, increasing the relevance of fault-tolerance. Atomic broadcast enables fault-tolerant distributed agreement, yet it is costly to solve. Most practical algorithms entail linear work per broadcast message. AllConcur -- a leaderless approach -- reduces the work, by connecting the servers via a sparse resilient overlay network; yet, this resiliency entails redundancy, limiting the reduction of work. In this paper, we propose AllConcur+, an atomic broadcast algorithm that lifts this limitation: During intervals with no failures, it achieves minimal work by using a redundancy-free overlay network. When failures do occur, it automatically recovers by switching to a resilient overlay network. In our performance evaluation of non-failure scenarios, AllConcur+ achieves comparable throughput to AllGather -- a non-fault-tolerant distributed agreement algorithm -- and outperforms AllConcur, LCR and Libpaxos both in terms of throughput and latency. Furthermore, our evaluation of failure scenarios shows that AllConcur+'s expected performance is robust with regard to occasional failures. Thus, for realistic use cases, leveraging redundancy-free distributed agreement during intervals with no failures improves performance significantly.Comment: Overview: 24 pages, 6 sections, 3 appendices, 8 figures, 3 tables. Modifications from previous version: extended the evaluation of AllConcur+ with a simulation of a multiple datacenters deploymen