Maria Isabel Catarino Couceiro

Cache Coherence in Distributed and Replicated Transactional Memory Systems

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

Abstract

Software Transactional Memory (STM) systems have emerged as a powerful paradigm to develop concurrent applications. At current date, however, the problem of how to build efficient distributed and replicated STMs to enhance both dependability and performance is still largely unexplored. This thesis addresses this problem by analyzing, implementing and evaluating techniques to maintain the consistency of the replicated STM data using a functional prototype named D2STM. Transactions are autonomously processed on each node, avoiding any replica inter-communication during transaction execution. Consistency is enforced at transaction commit time by the implemented non-blocking distributed certification schemes. This thesis also introduces BFC (Bloom Filter Certification), which exploits a novel Bloom Filter-based encoding mechanism that permits to significantly reduce the overheads of replica coordination at the cost of a user tunable increase in the probability of transaction abort. Standard STM benchmarks, used evaluate the implemented distributed certification schemes, show that the BFC scheme permits to achieve remarkable performance gains (approximately 30% when compared to a classic non-voting certification scheme) even for negligible (e.g. 1%) increases of the transaction abort rate.

Publicações

Cache Coherence in Distributed and Replicated Transactional Memory Systems: Maria Isabel Catarino Couceiro; MSc Thesis. Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa.; September, 2009.; Available BibTeX, MSC Thesis, and mid-term report.
D2STM: Memória Transaccional em Software Distribuída e Confiável: M. Couceiro, P. Romano, N. Carvalho e L. Rodrigues.; Actas do primeiro Simpósio de Informática (Inforum), Lisboa, Portugal, Sep, 2009; Available BibTeX, extended report (pdf).
D2STM: Dependable Distributed Software Transactional Memory: M. Couceiro, P. Romano, N. Carvalho, L. Rodrigues.; Proceedings of the 15th Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC 09), Shanghai, China, November 16-18, 2009.; Available BibTeX, abstract (html) and report (pdf).

Luís Rodrigues