Detail

Towards Distributed Software Transactional Memories

The recent architectural trend that has lead to the widespread adoption of multi-core CPUs has fostered a remarkable research interest in Software Transactional Memory (STM). As STMs are starting to face the high availability and scalability requirements of real-world production environments, it is natural to foresee the need for replication solutions specifically tailored for STMs.
Since databases and STMs share the same key abstraction of atomic transaction, one could wonder whether the mechanisms originally designed for database replication could be successfully and seamlessly exploited also to support replication of STM systems.

In this talk we will address exactly this question, highlighting some critical performance issues related to the application of state of the art database replication techniques in the context of STM systems, and presenting some of our recent research directions aimed at designing and implementing high performance replication strategies able to meet the unique requirements of STMs.