Scalable Distributed Concurrency Protocol with Priority Support
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Date
2003-08-01
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Abstract
Middleware components are becoming increasingly important as applications share computational resources in large distributed environments, such as web services, high-end clusters with ever larger number of processors, computational grids and an increasingly large server farms. One of the main challenges in such environments is to achieve scalability of synchronization. Another challenge is posed by requirement for shared resources with a need for QoS and real-time support. In general, concurrency services arbitrate resource requests in distributed systems. But concurrency protocols currently lack scalability and support for service differentiation based on QoS requirements. Adding such guarantees enables resource sharing and computing with distributed objects in systems with a large number of nodes and supporting a wide range of QoS metrics.
The objective of this thesis is to enhance middleware services to provide scalability of synchronization and to support service differentiation based on priorities. We have designed and implemented middleware protocols in support of these objectives. Its essence is a novel, peer-to-peer, fully decentralized protocol for multi-mode hierarchical locking, which is applicable to transaction-style processing and distributed agreement.
We discuss the design and implementation details of the protocols and demonstrate high scalability combined with low response times in high-performance cluster environments as well as TCP/IP networks when compared to a prior protocol for distributed synchronization. The prioritized version of the protocol is shown to offer differentiated response times to real-time applications with support for protocols to bound priority inversion such as PCEP and PIP.
Our approach was originally motivated by CORBA concurrency services. Beyond CORBA, its principles are shown to provide benefits to general distributed concurrency services and transaction models. Besides its technical strengths, our approach is intriguing due to its simplicity and its wide applicability, ranging from large-scale clusters to server-style computing and real-time applications. In general, the results of this thesis impact applications sharing resources across large distributed environments ranging from hierarchical locking in real-time databases and database transactions to distributed object environments in large-scale embedded systems including real-time applications.
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scalable middleware services, middleware concurrency services, peer-to-peer protocol, hierarchical locking, distributed mutual exclusion
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MS
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Computer Science
