Low-overhead distributed transaction coordination
Author(s)
Cowling, James (James Alexander)
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Other Contributors
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Advisor
Barbara H. Liskov.
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This thesis presents Granola, a transaction coordination infrastructure for building reliable distributed storage applications. Granola provides a strong consistency model, while significantly reducing transaction coordination overhead. Granola supports general atomic operations, enabling it to be used as a platform on which to build various storage systems, e.g., databases or object stores. We introduce specific support for independent transactions, a new type of distributed transaction, that we can serialize with no locking overhead and no aborts due to write conflicts. Granola uses a novel timestamp-based coordination mechanism to serialize distributed transactions, offering lower latency and higher throughput than previous systems that offer strong consistency. Our experiments show that Granola has low overhead, is scalable and has high throughput. We used Granola to deploy an existing single-node database application, creating a distributed database application with minimal code modifications. We run the TPC-C benchmark on this platform, and achieve 3 x the throughput of existing lock-based approaches.
Description
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (p. 167-173).
Date issued
2012Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer SciencePublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.