8,374 research outputs found
The Homeostasis Protocol: Avoiding Transaction Coordination Through Program Analysis
Datastores today rely on distribution and replication to achieve improved
performance and fault-tolerance. But correctness of many applications depends
on strong consistency properties - something that can impose substantial
overheads, since it requires coordinating the behavior of multiple nodes. This
paper describes a new approach to achieving strong consistency in distributed
systems while minimizing communication between nodes. The key insight is to
allow the state of the system to be inconsistent during execution, as long as
this inconsistency is bounded and does not affect transaction correctness. In
contrast to previous work, our approach uses program analysis to extract
semantic information about permissible levels of inconsistency and is fully
automated. We then employ a novel homeostasis protocol to allow sites to
operate independently, without communicating, as long as any inconsistency is
governed by appropriate treaties between the nodes. We discuss mechanisms for
optimizing treaties based on workload characteristics to minimize
communication, as well as a prototype implementation and experiments that
demonstrate the benefits of our approach on common transactional benchmarks
SICStus MT - A Multithreaded Execution Environment for SICStus Prolog
The development of intelligent software agents and other
complex applications which continuously interact with their
environments has been one of the reasons why explicit concurrency has
become a necessity in a modern Prolog system today. Such applications
need to perform several tasks which may be very different with respect
to how they are implemented in Prolog. Performing these tasks
simultaneously is very tedious without language support.
This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a
prototype multithreaded execution environment for SICStus Prolog. The
threads are dynamically managed using a small and compact set of
Prolog primitives implemented in a portable way, requiring almost no
support from the underlying operating system
Middleware-based Database Replication: The Gaps between Theory and Practice
The need for high availability and performance in data management systems has
been fueling a long running interest in database replication from both academia
and industry. However, academic groups often attack replication problems in
isolation, overlooking the need for completeness in their solutions, while
commercial teams take a holistic approach that often misses opportunities for
fundamental innovation. This has created over time a gap between academic
research and industrial practice.
This paper aims to characterize the gap along three axes: performance,
availability, and administration. We build on our own experience developing and
deploying replication systems in commercial and academic settings, as well as
on a large body of prior related work. We sift through representative examples
from the last decade of open-source, academic, and commercial database
replication systems and combine this material with case studies from real
systems deployed at Fortune 500 customers. We propose two agendas, one for
academic research and one for industrial R&D, which we believe can bridge the
gap within 5-10 years. This way, we hope to both motivate and help researchers
in making the theory and practice of middleware-based database replication more
relevant to each other.Comment: 14 pages. Appears in Proc. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on
Management of Data, Vancouver, Canada, June 200
A Template for Implementing Fast Lock-free Trees Using HTM
Algorithms that use hardware transactional memory (HTM) must provide a
software-only fallback path to guarantee progress. The design of the fallback
path can have a profound impact on performance. If the fallback path is allowed
to run concurrently with hardware transactions, then hardware transactions must
be instrumented, adding significant overhead. Otherwise, hardware transactions
must wait for any processes on the fallback path, causing concurrency
bottlenecks, or move to the fallback path. We introduce an approach that
combines the best of both worlds. The key idea is to use three execution paths:
an HTM fast path, an HTM middle path, and a software fallback path, such that
the middle path can run concurrently with each of the other two. The fast path
and fallback path do not run concurrently, so the fast path incurs no
instrumentation overhead. Furthermore, fast path transactions can move to the
middle path instead of waiting or moving to the software path. We demonstrate
our approach by producing an accelerated version of the tree update template of
Brown et al., which can be used to implement fast lock-free data structures
based on down-trees. We used the accelerated template to implement two
lock-free trees: a binary search tree (BST), and an (a,b)-tree (a
generalization of a B-tree). Experiments show that, with 72 concurrent
processes, our accelerated (a,b)-tree performs between 4.0x and 4.2x as many
operations per second as an implementation obtained using the original tree
update template
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