OPODIS 2014: Principles of Distributed Systems pp 485-500 | Cite as

A Practical Distributed Universal Construction with Unknown Participants

  • Pierre Sutra
  • Étienne Rivière
  • Pascal Felber
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 8878)

Abstract

Modern distributed systems employ atomic read-modify-write primitives to coordinate concurrent operations. Such primitives are typically built on top of a central server, or rely on an agreement protocol. Both approaches provide a universal construction, that is, a general mechanism to construct atomic and responsive objects. These two techniques are however known to be inherently costly. As a consequence, they may result in bottlenecks in applications using them for coordination. In this paper, we investigate another direction to implement a universal construction. Our idea is to delegate the implementation of the universal construction to the clients, and solely implement a distributed shared atomic memory on the servers side. The construction we propose is obstruction-free. It can be implemented in a purely asynchronous manner, and it does not assume the knowledge of the participants. It is built on top of grafarius and racing objects, two novel shared abstractions that we introduce in detail. To assess the benefits of our approach, we present a prototype implementation on top of the Cassandra data store, and compare it empirically to the Zookeeper coordination service.

Keywords

Time Complexity Shared Memory Critical Section Prototype Implementation Decidable Object 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Pierre Sutra
    • 1
  • Étienne Rivière
    • 1
  • Pascal Felber
    • 1
  1. 1.University of NeuchâtelSwitzerland

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