Low-overhead distributed transaction coordination

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.

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

2012

Author dc:creator

• Cowling, James (James Alexander)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Barbara H. Liskov.

• 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/1721.1/75706

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/75706