HyFlow: A High Performance Distributed Software Transactional Memory Framework

We present HyFlow - a distributed software transactional memory (D-STM) framework for distributed concurrency control. Lock-based concurrency control suffers from drawbacks including deadlocks, livelocks, and scalability and composability challenges. These problems are exacerbated in distributed systems due to their distributed versions which are more complex to cope with (e.g., distributed deadlocks). STM and D-STM are promising alternatives to lock-based and distributed lock-based concurrency control for centralized and distributed systems, respectively, that overcome these difficulties. HyFlow is a Java framework for DSTM, with pluggable support for directory lookup protocols, transactional synchronization and recovery mechanisms, contention management policies, cache coherence protocols, and network communication protocols. HyFlow exports a simple distributed programming model that excludes locks: using (Java 5) annotations, atomic sections are defiend as transactions, in which reads and writes to shared, local and remote objects appear to take effect instantaneously. No changes are needed to the underlying virtual machine or compiler. We describe HyFlow's architecture and implementation, and report on experimental studies comparing HyFlow against competing models including Java remote method invocation (RMI) with mutual exclusion and read/write locks, distributed shared memory (DSM), and directory-based D-STM.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Department dc:contributor.department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Saad Ibrahim, Mohamed Mohamed

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Ravindran, Binoy

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Ismail, Mohamed A.
• Plassmann, Paul E.
• Broadwater, Robert P.

• Directory Protocols
• Cache Coherence
• Contention Management
• Control-Flow
• Dataflow
• Software Transactional Memory
• Distributed Systems

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-05182011-095228

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/32966