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High-throughput state-machine replication using software transactional memory

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Abstract

State-machine replication is a common way of constructing general purpose fault tolerance systems. To ensure replica consistency, requests must be executed sequentially according to some total order at all non-faulty replicas. Unfortunately, this could severely limit the system throughput. This issue has been partially addressed by identifying non-conflicting requests based on application semantics and executing these requests concurrently. However, identifying and tracking non-conflicting requests require intimate knowledge of application design and implementation, and a custom fault tolerance solution developed for one application cannot be easily adopted by other applications. Software transactional memory offers a new way of constructing concurrent programs. In this article, we present the mechanisms needed to retrofit existing concurrency control algorithms designed for software transactional memory for state-machine replication. The main benefit for using software transactional memory in state-machine replication is that general purpose concurrency control mechanisms can be designed without deep knowledge of application semantics. As such, new fault tolerance systems based on state-machine replications with excellent throughput can be easily designed and maintained. In this article, we introduce three different concurrency control mechanisms for state-machine replication using software transactional memory, namely, ordered strong strict two-phase locking, conventional timestamp-based multiversion concurrency control, and speculative timestamp-based multiversion concurrency control. Our experiments show that speculative timestamp-based multiversion concurrency control mechanism has the best performance in all types of workload, the conventional timestamp-based multiversion concurrency control offers the worst performance due to high abort rate in the presence of even moderate contention between transactions. The ordered strong strict two-phase locking mechanism offers the simplest solution with excellent performance in low contention workload, and fairly good performance in high contention workload.

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Acknowledgments

We sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions . An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 8th International Conference on Advanced Software Engineering & Its Applications [31]. This work was supported in part by a Graduate Faculty Travel Award from Cleveland State University, by the National Key Technologies R&D Program of China under Grant 2015BAK38B01, and by a grant from the special funds project for scientific research of public welfare industry from the Ministry of Land and Resources of the Peoples Republic of China No. 201511079.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, OH, 44115, USA

    Wenbing Zhao

  2. Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin, 10100 Burnet Road, Austin, TX, 78758-4497, USA

    William Yang

  3. Agilysys Inc., Bellevue, WA, USA

    Honglei Zhang

  4. Division of Biostatistics and Biomathematics, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02114, USA

    Jack Yang

  5. School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, 100083, China

    Xiong Luo

  6. Development Research Center of China Geological Survey, Key Laboratory of Geological Information Technology, Ministry of Land and Resources, Beijing, 100037, China

    Yueqin Zhu

  7. Department of Information Science, George Washington Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology, Joint Bioinformatics Program of University of Arkansas at Little Rock and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, 2801 S. University Avenue, Little Rock, AR, 72204, USA

    Mary Yang

  8. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Detroit Mercy, Detroit, MI, 48221, USA

    Chaomin Luo

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  1. Wenbing Zhao
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Correspondence to Wenbing Zhao.

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Zhao, W., Yang, W., Zhang, H. et al. High-throughput state-machine replication using software transactional memory. J Supercomput 72, 4379–4398 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1747-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1747-2

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