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Home > Events > Software Seminar Series > 2019 > Reconfigurable Atomic Transaction Commit

Manuel Bravo

Tuesday, September 17, 2019

10:45am Meeting room 302 (Mountain View), level 3

Manuel Bravo, Post-doctoral Researcher, IMDEA Software Institute

Reconfigurable Atomic Transaction Commit

Abstract:

Modern data stores achieve scalability by partitioning data into shards and fault-tolerance by replicating each shard across several servers. A key component of such systems is a Transaction Certification Service (TCS), which atomically commits a transaction spanning multiple shards. Existing TCS protocols require 2f+1 crash-stop replicas per shard to tolerate f failures. In this work we present atomic commit protocols that require only f+1 replicas and reconfigure the system upon failures using an external reconfiguration service. We furthermore rigorously prove that these protocols correctly implement a recently proposed TCS specification. We present protocols in two different models–the standard asynchronous message-passing model and a model with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which allows a machine to access the memory of another machine over the network without involving the latter’s CPU. Our protocols are inspired by a recent FARM system for RDMA-based transaction processing. Our work codifies the core ideas of FARM as distributed TCS protocols, rigorously proves them correct and highlights the trade-offs required by the use of RDMA.