Multithreaded transaction processing in distributed systems

Abstract

Distributed operating systems are potentially more powerful than traditional operating systems due to their advantages of fault tolerance, parallelism, scalability, reliability, resource sharing and availability. The price to pay for such power is the complexity encountered in software design and implementation of such systems. Various software tools like Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) have been devised to help simplify the process of building distributed applications. Light-weight processes or threads is another such tool that helps improve system performance. In this project, support for atomic transactions has been provided on an existing RPC system. By incorporating a multithreaded architecture in this system, the goal of improving performance has also been attempted. A traditional banking system has been prototyped along the above goals of combining high performance with support for atomic transactions in distributed systems. © 1997 by Elsevier Science Inc.