João Carlos Moreira Fernandes


Speculative Execution on Replicated and Distributed Software Transactional Memory Systems


Tese submetida para provas de mestrado em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.

Abstract

This work describes and evaluates SPECULA, a distributed and replicated software transactional memory system based on a certification scheme. This system tackles the negative effects of network latency, through the optimistic execution of code. Transactions are executed on a single node, in an uncoordinated fashion, and the result of their local validation is used as a prediction of the result of the final validation. The results of speculatively executed transactions (i.e., the modifications to the transactional state) are made visible to future transactions in an optimistic fashion. This speculative process repeats itself, creating a chain of speculatively executed transactions. If the final validation of a speculatively committed transaction allows it to commit system-wide, its result is made definitive; otherwise, a cascading abort takes place and the system restarts its execution in the state that preceded the mis-speculation. This speculative behavior is fully transparent for both the application and the programmer. The proposed design was evaluated using well known benchmarks that exercise very different scenarios, namely, Bank Benchmark and STMBench7.

Publicações

Speculative Execution on Replicated and Distributed Software Transactional Memory Systems
João Carlos Moreira Fernandes
MSc Thesis. Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.
October, 2011.
Available BibTeX, MSC Thesis, extended abstract of the thesis, and mid-term report.
SPECULA: um Protocolo de Replicação Preditiva para Memória Transaccional por Software Distribuída.
J. Fernandes, N. Carvalho, P. Romano, and L. Rodrigues.
Actas do terceiro Simpósio de Informática (Inforum), Coimbra, Portugal, Sep, 2011
Available BibTeX, extended report (pdf).
SPECULA: Speculative Replication of Software Transactional Memory.
S. Peluso, J. Fernandes, P. Romano, F. Quaglia and L. Rodrigues.
Proceedings of the 31st International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS 2012), Irvine, California, USA, October 2012.

Luís Rodrigues