1,714 research outputs found
Cuckoo: a Language for Implementing Memory- and Thread-safe System Services
This paper is centered around the design of a thread- and memory-safe language, primarily for the compilation of application-specific services for extensible operating systems. We describe various issues that have influenced the design of our language, called Cuckoo, that guarantees safety of programs with potentially asynchronous flows of control. Comparisons are drawn between Cuckoo and related software safety techniques, including Cyclone and software-based fault isolation (SFI), and performance results suggest our prototype compiler is capable of generating safe code that executes with low runtime overheads, even without potential code optimizations. Compared to Cyclone, Cuckoo is able to safely guard accesses to memory when programs are multithreaded. Similarly, Cuckoo is capable of enforcing memory safety in situations that are potentially troublesome for techniques such as SFI
Exploring Key-Value Stores in Multi-Writer Byzantine-Resilient Register Emulations
Resilient register emulation is a fundamental technique to implement dependable storage and distributed systems. In data-centric models, where servers are modeled as fail-prone base objects, classical solutions achieve resilience by using fault-tolerant quorums of read-write registers or read-modify-write objects. Recently, this model has attracted renewed interest due to the popularity of cloud storage providers (e.g., Amazon S3), that can be modeled as key-value stores (KVSs) and combined for providing secure and dependable multi-cloud storage services. In this paper we present three novel wait-free multi-writer multi-reader regular register emulations on top of Byzantine-prone KVSs. We implemented and evaluated these constructions using five existing cloud storage services and show that their performance matches or surpasses existing data-centric register emulations
Applying Prolog to Develop Distributed Systems
Development of distributed systems is a difficult task. Declarative
programming techniques hold a promising potential for effectively supporting
programmer in this challenge. While Datalog-based languages have been actively
explored for programming distributed systems, Prolog received relatively little
attention in this application area so far. In this paper we present a
Prolog-based programming system, called DAHL, for the declarative development
of distributed systems. DAHL extends Prolog with an event-driven control
mechanism and built-in networking procedures. Our experimental evaluation using
a distributed hash-table data structure, a protocol for achieving Byzantine
fault tolerance, and a distributed software model checker - all implemented in
DAHL - indicates the viability of the approach
Versioned boxes as the basis for memory transactions
AbstractIn this paper, we propose the use of Versioned Boxes, which keep a history of values, as the basis for language-level memory transactions. Unlike previous work on software transactional memory, in our proposal read-only transactions never conflict with any other concurrent transaction. This may improve significantly the concurrency on applications which have longer transactions and a high read/write ratio.Furthermore, we discuss how we can reduce transaction conflicts by delaying computations and re-executing only parts of a transaction in case of a conflict. We propose two language-level abstractions to support these strategies: the per-transaction boxes and the restartable transactions.Finally, we lay out the basis for a more generic model, which better supports fine-grained restartable transactions. The goal of this new model is to generalize the previous two abstractions to reduce conflicts
Actors: The Ideal Abstraction for Programming Kernel-Based Concurrency
GPU and multicore hardware architectures are commonly
used in many different application areas to accelerate problem solutions
relative to single CPU architectures. The typical approach to accessing
these hardware architectures requires embedding logic into the programming
language used to construct the application; the two primary forms
of embedding are: calls to API routines to access the concurrent functionality,
or pragmas providing concurrency hints to a language compiler
such that particular blocks of code are targeted to the concurrent functionality.
The former approach is verbose and semantically bankrupt,
while the success of the latter approach is restricted to simple, static
uses of the functionality.
Actor-based applications are constructed from independent, encapsulated
actors that interact through strongly-typed channels. This paper
presents a first attempt at using actors to program kernels targeted at
such concurrent hardware. Besides the glove-like fit of a kernel to the actor
abstraction, quantitative code analysis shows that actor-based kernels
are always significantly simpler than API-based coding, and generally
simpler than pragma-based coding. Additionally, performance measurements
show that the overheads of actor-based kernels are commensurate
to API-based kernels, and range from equivalent to vastly improved for
pragma-based annotations, both for sample and real-world applications
Ensuring referential integrity under causal consistency
Referential integrity (RI) is an important correctness property of a shared,
distributed object storage system. It is sometimes thought that enforcing RI
requires a strong form of consistency. In this paper, we argue that causal
consistency suffices to maintain RI. We support this argument with pseudocode
for a reference CRDT data type that maintains RI under causal consistency.
QuickCheck has not found any errors in the model
- …