Speculative Protocols for Actively Replicated Transactional Systems

Roberto Palmieri

Abstract:
Nowadays, the role of transactions has become twofold:
- they are used in order to guarantee consistency and atomicity in applications manipulating data;
- they are used as a means to synchronize the activities of threads working concurrently within any software layer.
Overall, the concept of transaction, historically related to support data manipulation in the context of database systems, has been widened so to encapsulate synchronization aspects in the context of parallel and concurrent applications. The latter aspect found its expression via Software Transactional Memory (STM) technologies, which have been oriented to mask the complexity of synchronization to the application programmers, thus moving along the path of bringing the power of multi/many-core architectures into the hand of ordinary, non-specialized, software developers. Such a widened scope of transactions, together with significant technological innovations possibly impacting the execution profile/cost of traditional database transactions (e.g. the advent of SSD storage systems) and the level of transaction parallelism (e.g. the advent of many-core architectures), raise the need for reconsidering the design of protocols supporting fault tolerance.
In this thesis, I focus on fault tolerant protocols based on the active replication paradigm, which is done by systematically exploiting speculative computation approaches. More in detail, I worked on innovative speculative transactional replication protocols relying on Optimistic Atomic Broadcast group communication primitives, which have been used as a building block for replicas coordination. Some proposed results are mostly oriented to theory, while others have a more strict relation with pragmatic aspects associated with the design/implementation of replicated transactional systems.

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