Atomic Transfer for Distributed Systems

Building applications and information systems increasingly means dealing with concurrency and faults stemming from distribution of system components. Atomic transactions are a well-known method for transferring the responsibility for handling concurrency and faults from developers to the software\u27s execution environment, but incur considerable execution overhead. This dissertation investigates methods that shift some of the burden of concurrency control into the network layer, to reduce response times and increase throughput. It anticipates future programmable network devices, enabling customized high-performance network protocols. We propose Atomic Transfer (AT), a distributed algorithm to prevent race conditions due to messages crossing on a path of network switches. Switches check request messages for conflicts with response messages traveling in the opposite direction. Conflicting requests are dropped, obviating the request\u27s receiving host from detecting and handling the conflict. AT is designed to perform well under high data contention, as concurrency control effort is balanced across a network instead of being handled by the contended endpoint hosts themselves. We use AT as the basis for a new optimistic transactional cache consistency algorithm, supporting execution of atomic applications caching shared data. We then present a scalable refinement, allowing hierarchical consistent caches with predictable performance despite high data update rates. We give detailed I/O Automata models of our algorithms along with correctness proofs. We begin with a simplified model, assuming static network paths and no message loss, and then refine it to support dynamic network paths and safe handling of message loss. We present a trie-based data structure for accelerating conflict-checking on switches, with benchmarks suggesting the feasibility of our approach from a performance stand-point

Efficient Evaluation of Set Expressions

In this thesis, we study the problem of evaluating set expressions over sorted sets in the comparison model. The problem arises in the context of evaluating search queries in text database systems; most text search engines maintain an inverted list, which consists of a set of documents that contain each possible word. Thus, answering a query is reduced to computing the union, the intersection, or a more complex set expression over sets of documents containing the words in the query. At the first step, for a given expression on a number of sets and the sizes of the sets, we investigate the worst-case complexity of evaluating the expression in terms of the sizes of the sets. We prove lower bounds and provide algorithms with the matching running time up to a constant factor. We then refine the problem further and design an algorithm that computes such expressions according to the degree by which the input sets are interleaved rather than only considering sets sizes. %We prove the running time of our algorithm is asymptotically optimal. We prove the optimality of our algorithm by way of presenting a matching lower bound sensitive to the interleaving measure. The algorithms we present are different in the set of set operators they allow in input expressions. We provide algorithms that are worst-case optimal for inputs with union, intersection, and symmetric difference operators. One of the algorithms we provide also supports minus and complement operators and is conjectured to be optimal when an input is allowed to contain these operators as well. We also provide a worst-case optimal algorithm for the form of problem where the input may contain "threshold'" operators, which generalize union and intersection operators: for a number t, a t-threshold operator selects elements that appear in at least in t of the operand sets. Finally, the adaptive algorithm we provide supports union and intersection operators