Asynchronous Lease-based Replication of Software Transactional Memory

N. Carvaho, P. Romano and L. Rodrigues

Selected sections of this report were published in the Proceedings of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 11th Middleware Conference, Bangalore, India, Nov 2010

Abstract

Software Transactional Memory (STM) systems have emerged as a powerful middleware paradigm for parallel programming. At current date, however, the problem of how to leverage replication to enhance dependability and scalability of STMs is still largely unexplored. In this paper we present Asynchronous Lease Certification (ALC), an innovative STM replication scheme that exploits the notion of asynchronous lease to reduce the replica coordination overhead and shelter transactions from repeated abortions due to conflicts originated on remote nodes. These features allow ALC to achieve up to tenfold reduction of the commit latency phase in scenarios of low contention when compared with state of the art fault-tolerant replication schemes, and to boost the throughput of long-running transactions by a 4x factor in high conflict scenarios.

Also available extended report (pdf)


Luís Rodrigues