Static Application-Level Race Detection in STM Haskell using Contracts

Writing concurrent programs is a hard task, even when using high-level synchronization primitives such as transactional memories together with a functional language with well-controlled side-effects such as Haskell, because the interferences generated by the processes to each other can occur at different levels and in a very subtle way. The problem occurs when a thread leaves or exposes the shared data in an inconsistent state with respect to the application logic or the real meaning of the data. In this paper, we propose to associate contracts to transactions and we define a program transformation that makes it possible to extend static contract checking in the context of STM Haskell. As a result, we are able to check statically that each transaction of a STM Haskell program handles the shared data in a such way that a given consistency property, expressed in the form of a user-defined boolean function, is preserved. This ensures that bad interference will not occur during the execution of the concurrent program.Comment: In Proceedings PLACES 2013, arXiv:1312.2218. [email protected]; [email protected]

Atomic commitment in transactional DHTs

We investigate the problem of atomic commit in transactional database systems built on top of Distributed Hash Tables. DHTs provide a decentralized way to store and look up data. To solve the atomic commit problem we propose to use an adaption of Paxos commit as a non-blocking algorithm. We exploit the symmetric replication technique existing in the DKS DHT to determine which nodes are necessary to execute the commit algorithm. By doing so we achieve a lower number of communication rounds and a reduction of meta-data in contrast to traditional Three-Phase-Commit protocols. We also show how the proposed solution can cope with dynamism due to churn in DHTs. Our solution works correctly relying only on an inaccurate failure detection of node failure which is necessary for systems running over the Internet

Specification of multiparty audio and video interaction based on the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing

The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) is an emerging ISO/ITU-T standard. It provides a framework of abstractions based on viewpoints, and it defines five viewpoint languages to model open distributed systems. This paper uses the viewpoint languages to specify multiparty audio/video exchange in distributed systems. To the designers of distributed systems, it shows how the concepts and rules of RM-ODP can be applied.\ud \ud The ODP ¿binding object¿ is an important concept to model continuous data flows in distributed systems. We take this concept as a basis for multiparty audio and video flow exchanges, and we provide five ODP viewpoint specifications, each emphasising a particular concern. To ensure overall correctness, special attention is paid to the mapping between the ODP viewpoint specifications

Maintaining the correctness of transactional memory programs

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia InformáticaThis dissertation addresses the challenge of maintaining the correctness of transactional memory programs, while improving its parallelism with small transactions and relaxed isolation levels. The efficiency of the transactional memory systems depends directly on the level of parallelism, which in turn depends on the conflict rate. A high conflict rate between memory transactions can be addressed by reducing the scope of transactions, but this approach may turn the application prone to the occurrence of atomicity violations. Another way to address this issue is to ignore some of the conflicts by using a relaxed isolation level, such as snapshot isolation, at the cost of introducing write-skews serialization anomalies that break the consistency guarantees provided by a stronger consistency property, such as opacity. In order to tackle the correctness issues raised by the atomicity violations and the write-skew anomalies, we propose two static analysis techniques: one based in a novel static analysis algorithm that works on a dependency graph of program variables and detects atomicity violations; and a second one based in a shape analysis technique supported by separation logic augmented with heap path expressions, a novel representation based on sequences of heap dereferences that certifies if a transactional memory program executing under snapshot isolation is free from writeskew anomalies. The evaluation of the runtime execution of a transactional memory algorithm using snapshot isolation requires a framework that allows an efficient implementation of a multi-version algorithm and, at the same time, enables its comparison with other existing transactional memory algorithms. In the Java programming language there was no framework satisfying both these requirements. Hence, we extended an existing software transactional memory framework that already supported efficient implementations of some transactional memory algorithms, to also support the efficient implementation of multi-version algorithms. The key insight for this extension is the support for storing the transactional metadata adjacent to memory locations. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by analyzing its impact with both single- and multi-version transactional memory algorithms using several transactional workloads.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - PhD research grant SFRH/BD/41765/2007, and in the research projects Synergy-VM (PTDC/EIA-EIA/113613/2009), and RepComp (PTDC/EIAEIA/ 108963/2008

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

STM: Lock-Free Synchronization

Current parallel programming uses low-level programming constructs like threads and explicit synchronization (for example, locks, semaphores and monitors) to coordinate thread execution which makes these programs difficult to design, program and debug. In this paper we present Software Transactional Memory (STM) which is a promising new approach for programming in parallel processors having shared memory. It is a concurrency control mechanism that is widely considered to be easier to use by programmers than other mechanisms such as locking. It allows portions of a program to execute in isolation, without regard to other, concurrently executing tasks. A programmer can reason about the correctness of code within a transaction and need not worry about complex interactions with other, concurrently executing parts of the program