Memory-mapped transactions

Memory-mapped transactions combine the advantages of both memory mapping and transactions to provide a programming interface for concurrently accessing data on disk without explicit I/O or locking operations. This interface enables a programmer to design a complex serial program that accesses only main memory, and with little to no modification, convert the program into correct code with multiple processes that can simultaneously access disk. I implemented LIBXAC, a prototype for an efficient and portable system supporting memory-mapped transactions. LIBXAC is a C library that supports atomic transactions on memory-mapped files. LIBXAC guarantees that transactions are serializable, and it uses a multiversion concurrency control algorithm to ensure that all transactions, even aborted transactions, always see a consistent view of a memory-mapped file. LIBXAC was tested on Linux, and it is portable because it is written as a user-space library, and because it does not rely on special operating system support for transactions. With LIBXAC, I was easily able to convert existing serial, memory-mapped implementations of a B+-tree and a cache-oblivious B-tree into parallel versions that support concurrent searches and insertions.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Sukha, Jim

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Charles E. Leiserson and Bradley C. Kuszmaul.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33363

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33363