Asynchronous lease-based replication of software transactional memory

Abstract

Software TransactionalMemory (STM) systems have emerged as a powerful middleware paradigm for parallel programming. At current date, however, the problem of how to leverage replication to enhance dependability and scalability of STMs is still largely unexplored. In this paper we present Asynchronous Lease Certification (ALC), an innovative STM replication scheme that exploits the notion of asynchronous lease to reduce the replica coordination overhead and shelter transactions from repeated abortions due to conflicts originated on remote nodes. These features allow ALC to achieve up to a tenfold reduction of the commit latency phase in scenarios of low contention when compared with state of the art fault-tolerant replication schemes, and to boost the throughput of longrunning transactions by a 4x factor in high conflict scenarios. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2010.