Showing papers on "Concurrency control published in 2013"

Spanner: Google’s Globally Distributed Database

Abstract: Spanner is Google’s scalable, multiversion, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This article describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: nonblocking reads in the past, lock-free snapshot transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.

Data management in cloud environments: NoSQL and NewSQL data stores

Abstract: Advances in Web technology and the proliferation of mobile devices and sensors connected to the Internet have resulted in immense processing and storage requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a paradigm that promises to meet these requirements. This work focuses on the storage aspect of cloud computing, specifically on data management in cloud environments. Traditional relational databases were designed in a different hardware and software era and are facing challenges in meeting the performance and scale requirements of Big Data. NoSQL and NewSQL data stores present themselves as alternatives that can handle huge volume of data. Because of the large number and diversity of existing NoSQL and NewSQL solutions, it is difficult to comprehend the domain and even more challenging to choose an appropriate solution for a specific task. Therefore, this paper reviews NoSQL and NewSQL solutions with the objective of: (1) providing a perspective in the field, (2) providing guidance to practitioners and researchers to choose the appropriate data store, and (3) identifying challenges and opportunities in the field. Specifically, the most prominent solutions are compared focusing on data models, querying, scaling, and security related capabilities. Features driving the ability to scale read requests and write requests, or scaling data storage are investigated, in particular partitioning, replication, consistency, and concurrency control. Furthermore, use cases and scenarios in which NoSQL and NewSQL data stores have been used are discussed and the suitability of various solutions for different sets of applications is examined. Consequently, this study has identified challenges in the field, including the immense diversity and inconsistency of terminologies, limited documentation, sparse comparison and benchmarking criteria, and nonexistence of standardized query languages.

The VoltDB Main Memory DBMS

Abstract: This paper describes the VoltDB DBMS as it exists in mid 2013. The focus is on design decisions, especially in concurrency control and high availability, as well as on the application areas where the system has found acceptance. Run-time performance numbers are also included.

Non-monotonic Snapshot Isolation: Scalable and Strong Consistency for Geo-replicated Transactional Systems

Abstract: Modern cloud systems are geo-replicated to improve application latency and availability. Transactional consistency is essential for application developers; however, the corresponding concurrency control and commitment protocols are costly in a geo-replicated setting. To minimize this cost, we identify the following essential scalability properties: (i) only replicas updated by a transaction T make steps to execute T; (ii) a read-only transaction never waits for concurrent transactions and always commits; (iii) a transaction may read object versions committed after it started; and (iv) two transactions synchronize with each other only if their writes conflict. We present Non-Monotonic Snapshot Isolation (NMSI), the first strong consistency criterion to allow implementations with all four properties. We also present a practical implementation of NMSI called Jessy, which we compare experimentally against a number of well-known criteria. Our measurements show that the latency and throughput of NMSI are comparable to the weakest criterion, read-committed, and between two to fourteen times faster than well-known strong consistencies.

Scaling MapReduce Applications Across Hybrid Clouds to Meet Soft Deadlines

Abstract: Cloud platforms make available a virtually infinite amount of computing resources, which are managed by third parties and are accessed by users on demand in a pay-per-use manner, with Quality of Service guarantees. This enables computing infrastructures to be scaled up and down accordingly to the amount of data to be processed. MapReduce is among the most popular models for development of Cloud applications. As the utilization of such programming model spreads across multiple application domains, the need for timely execution of these applications arises. While existing approaches focus in meeting deadlines via admission control or preemption of lower priority applications, we propose a policy for dynamic provisioning of Cloud resources to speed up execution of deadline-constrained MapReduce applications, by enabling concurrent execution of tasks, in order to meet a deadline for completion of the Map phase of the application. We describe the proposed algorithm and an actual implementation of it in the Aneka Cloud Platform. Experiments on such prototype implementation show that our proposed approach can effectively meet the soft deadlines while minimizing the budget for application execution.

Strategies for Energy-Efficient Resource Management of Hybrid Programming Models

Abstract: Many scientific applications are programmed using hybrid programming models that use both message passing and shared memory, due to the increasing prevalence of large-scale systems with multicore, multisocket nodes. Previous work has shown that energy efficiency can be improved using software-controlled execution schemes that consider both the programming model and the power-aware execution capabilities of the system. However, such approaches have focused on identifying optimal resource utilization for one programming model, either shared memory or message passing, in isolation. The potential solution space, thus the challenge, increases substantially when optimizing hybrid models since the possible resource configurations increase exponentially. Nonetheless, with the accelerating adoption of hybrid programming models, we increasingly need improved energy efficiency in hybrid parallel applications on large-scale systems. In this work, we present new software-controlled execution schemes that consider the effects of dynamic concurrency throttling (DCT) and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) in the context of hybrid programming models. Specifically, we present predictive models and novel algorithms based on statistical analysis that anticipate application power and time requirements under different concurrency and frequency configurations. We apply our models and methods to the NPB MZ benchmarks and selected applications from the ASC Sequoia codes. Overall, we achieve substantial energy savings (8.74 percent on average and up to 13.8 percent) with some performance gain (up to 7.5 percent) or negligible performance loss.

A real-time scheduling service for parallel tasks

Abstract: The multi-core revolution presents both opportunities and challenges for real-time systems. Parallel computing can yield significant speedup for individual tasks (enabling shorter deadlines, or more computation within the same deadline), but unless managed carefully may add complexity and overhead that could potentially wreck real-time performance. There is little experience to date with the design and implementation of realtime systems that allow parallel tasks, yet the state of the art cannot progress without the construction of such systems. In this work we describe the design and implementation of a scheduler and runtime dispatcher for a new concurrency platform, RT-OpenMP, whose goal is the execution of real-time workloads with intra-task parallelism.

Systematic Testing for Detecting Concurrency Errors in Erlang Programs

Abstract: We present the techniques used in Concuerror, a systematic testing tool able to find and reproduce a wide class of concurrency errors in Erlang programs. We describe how we take advantage of the characteristics of Erlang's actor model of concurrency to selectively instrument the program under test and how we subsequently employ a stateless search strategy to systematically explore the state space of process interleaving sequences triggered by unit tests. To ameliorate the problem of combinatorial explosion, we propose a novel technique for avoiding process blocks and describe how we can effectively combine it with preemption bounding, a heuristic algorithm for reducing the number of explored interleaving sequences. We also briefly discuss issues related to soundness, completeness and effectiveness of techniques used by Concuerror.

OCTET: capturing and controlling cross-thread dependences efficiently

Abstract: Parallel programming is essential for reaping the benefits of parallel hardware, but it is notoriously difficult to develop and debug reliable, scalable software systems. One key challenge is that modern languages and systems provide poor support for ensuring concurrency correctness properties - atomicity, sequential consistency, and multithreaded determinism - because all existing approaches are impractical. Dynamic, software-based approaches slow programs by up to an order of magnitude because capturing and controlling cross-thread dependences (i.e., conflicting accesses to shared memory) requires synchronization at virtually every access to potentially shared memory.This paper introduces a new software-based concurrency control mechanism called OCTET that soundly captures cross-thread dependences and can be used to build dynamic analyses for concurrency correctness. OCTET achieves low overheads by tracking the locality state of each potentially shared object. Non-conflicting accesses conform to the locality state and require no synchronization; only conflicting accesses require a state change and heavyweight synchronization. This optimistic tradeoff leads to significant efficiency gains in capturing cross-thread dependences: a prototype implementation of OCTET in a high-performance Java virtual machine slows real-world concurrent programs by only 26% on average. A dependence recorder, suitable for record & replay, built on top of OCTET adds an additional 5% overhead on average. These results suggest that OCTET can provide a foundation for developing low-overhead analyses that check and enforce concurrency correctness.

Worm-Bubble Flow Control

Abstract: Deadlock-free flow control should be designed with minimal cost, particularly for on-chip designs where area and power resources are greatly constrained. While Bubble Flow Control, proposed a decade ago, can avoid deadlock in VCT-switched tori with only one virtual channel (VC), there has been no working solution for wormhole switching that achieves the similar objective. Wormhole switching allows the channel buffer size to be smaller than the packet size, thus is preferred by on-chip networks. However, wormhole packets can span multiple routers, thereby creating additional channel dependences and adding complexities in both deadlock and starvation avoidance. In this paper, we propose Worm-Bubble Flow Control (WBFC), a new flow control scheme that can avoid deadlock in wormhole-switched tori using minimally 1-flit-sized buffers per VC and one VC in total. Moreover, any wormhole-switched topology with embedded rings can use WBFC to avoid deadlock within each ring. Simulation results from synthetic traffic and PARSEC benchmarks show that the proposed approach can achieve significant throughput improvement and also area and energy savings compared to an optimized Dateline routing approach.

Real-Time Database Systems: Architecture and Techniques

Abstract: In recent years, tremendous research has been devoted to the design of database systems for real-time applications, called real-time database systems (RTDBS), where transactions are associated with deadlines on their completion times, and some of the data objects in the database are associated with temporal constraints on their validity. Examples of important applications of RTDBS include stock trading systems, navigation systems and computer integrated manufacturing. Different transaction scheduling algorithms and concurrency control protocols have been proposed to satisfy transaction timing data temporal constraints. Other design issues important to the performance of a RTDBS are buffer management, index accesses and I/O scheduling. Real-Time Database Systems: Architecture and Techniques summarizes important research results in this area, and serves as an excellent reference for practitioners, researchers and educators of real-time systems and database systems.

Synchrovis: 3D visualization of monitoring traces in the city metaphor for analyzing concurrency

Abstract: The increasing code complexity in modern software systems exceeds the capabilities of most software engineers to understand the system's behavior by just looking at its program code. The addition of concurrency issues through the advent of multi-core processors in the consumer market further escalates this complexity. A solution to these problems is visualizing a model of the system to ease program comprehension. Especially for the comprehension of concurrency issues, static information is often not sufficient. For this purpose, profiling and monitoring can provide additional information on the actual behavior of a system. An established visualization approach is the 3D city metaphor. It utilizes the familiarity with navigating a city to improve program comprehension. In this paper, we present our trace-based SynchroVis 3D visualization approach for concurrency. It employs the city metaphor to visualize both static and dynamic properties of software systems with a focus on illustrating the concurrent behavior. To evaluate our approach, we provide an open source implementation of our concepts and present an exemplary dining philosophers scenario showing its feasibility.

Eliminating Concurrency Bugs in Multithreaded Software: A New Approach Based on Discrete-Event Control

Abstract: Computer hardware is moving from uniprocessor to multicore architectures. One problem arising in this evolution is that only parallel software can exploit the full performance potential of multicore architectures, and parallel software is far harder to write than conventional serial software. One important class of failures arising in parallel software is circular-wait deadlock in multithreaded programs. In our ongoing Gadara project, we use a special class of Petri nets, called Gadara nets, to systematically model multithreaded programs with lock allocation and release operations. In this paper, we propose an efficient optimal control synthesis methodology for ordinary Gadara nets that exploits the structural properties of Gadara nets via siphon analysis. Optimality in this context refers to the elimination of deadlocks in the program with minimally restrictive control logic. We formally establish a set of important properties of the proposed control synthesis methodology, and show that our algorithms never synthesize redundant control logic. We conduct experiments to evaluate the efficiency and scalability of the proposed methodology, and discuss the application of our results to real-world concurrent software.

Prototyping a Concurrency Model

Abstract: Many novel programming models for concurrency have been proposed in the wake of the multicore computing paradigm shift. They aim to raise the level of abstraction for expressing concurrency and synchronization in a program, and hence to help developers avoid programming errors. Because of this goal, the semantics of the models themselves becomes ever more complex, increasing the risk of design flaws. We propose a methodology for prototyping concurrency models using executable formal specifications. The prototype can be used to test and correct the model at an early stage. Once the development is completed, the executable formal specification serves as an unambiguous reference. We apply this methodology to SCOOP, an object-oriented concurrency model. Using this approach, we were able to uncover and fix three major flaws in the model.

Monitoring Data Usage in Distributed Systems

Abstract: IT systems manage increasing amounts of sensitive data and there is a growing concern that they comply with policies that regulate data usage. In this paper, we use temporal logic to express policies and runtime monitoring to check system compliance. While well-established methods for monitoring linearly ordered system behavior exist, a major challenge is monitoring distributed and concurrent systems where actions are locally observed in the different system parts. These observations can only be partially ordered, while policy compliance may depend on the actions' actual order of appearance. Technically speaking, it is in general intractable to check compliance of partially ordered traces. We identify fragments of our policy specification language for which compliance can be checked efficiently, namely, by monitoring a single representative trace in which the observed actions are totally ordered. Through a case study we show that the fragments are capable of expressing nontrivial policies and that monitoring representative traces is feasible on real-world data.

Generating Unit Tests for Concurrent Classes

Abstract: As computers become more and more powerful, programs are increasingly split up into multiple threads to leverage the power of multi-core CPUs. However, writing correct multi-threaded code is a hard problem, as the programmer has to ensure that all access to shared data is coordinated. Existing automated testing tools for multi-threaded code mainly focus on re-executing existing test cases with different schedules. In this paper, we introduce a novel coverage criterion that enforces concurrent execution of combinations of shared memory access points with different schedules, and present an approach that automatically generates test cases for this coverage criterion. Our CONSUITE prototype demonstrates that this approach can reliably reproduce known concurrency errors, and evaluation on nine complex open source classes revealed three previously unknown data-races.

CSeq: a concurrency pre-processor for sequential C verification tools

Abstract: Sequentialization translates concurrent programs into equivalent nondeterministic sequential programs so that the different concurrent schedules no longer need to be handled explicitly. It can thus be used as a concurrency preprocessing technique for automated sequential program verification tools. Our CSeq tool implements a novel sequentialization for C programs using pthreads, which extends the Lal/Reps sequentialization to support dynamic thread creation. CSeq now works with three different backend tools, CBMC, ESBMC, and LLBMC, and is competitive with state-of-the-art verification tools for concurrent programs.

Scalable Flow-Based Community Detection for Large-Scale Network Analysis

Abstract: Community-detection is a powerful approach to uncover important structures in large networks. Since networks often describe flow of some entity, flow-based community-detection methods are particularly interesting. One such algorithm is called Info map, which optimizes the objective function known as the map equation. While Info map is known to be an effective algorithm, its serial implementation cannot take advantage of multicore processing in modern computers. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel generalization of Info map called Relax Map. This algorithm relaxes concurrency assumptions to avoid lock overhead, achieving 70% parallel efficiency in shared-memory multicore experiments while exhibiting similar convergence properties and finding similar community structures as the serial algorithm. We evaluate our approach on a variety of real graph datasets as well as synthetic graphs produced by a popular graph generator used for benchmarking community detection algorithms. We describe the algorithm, the experiments, and some emerging research directions in high-performance community detection on massive graphs.

A Study of the Behavior of Synchronization Methods in Commonly Used Languages and Systems

Abstract: Synchronization is a central issue in concurrency and plays an important role in the behavior and performance of modern programmes. Programming languages and hardware designers are trying to provide synchronization constructs and primitives that can handle concurrency and synchronization issues efficiently. Programmers have to find a way to select the most appropriate constructs and primitives in order to gain the desired behavior and performance under concurrency. Several parameters and factors affect the choice, through complex interactions among (i) the language and the language constructs that it supports, (ii) the system architecture, (iii) possible run-time environments, virtual machine options and memory management support and (iv) applications. We present a systematic study of synchronization strategies, focusing on concurrent data structures. We have chosen concurrent data structures with different number of contention spots. We consider both coarse-grain and fine-grain locking strategies, as well as lock-free methods. We have investigated synchronization-aware implementations in C++, C# (.NET and Mono) and Java. Considering the machine architectures, we have studied the behavior of the implementations on both Intel's Nehalem and AMD's Bulldozer. The properties that we study are throughput and fairness under different workloads and multiprogramming execution environments. For NUMA architectures fairness is becoming as important as the typically considered throughput property. To the best of our knowledge this is the first systematic and comprehensive study of synchronization-aware implementations. This paper takes steps towards capturing a number of guiding principles and concerns for the selection of the programming environment and synchronization methods in connection to the application and the system characteristics.

Verifying Linearizability via Optimized Refinement Checking

Abstract: Linearizability is an important correctness criterion for implementations of concurrent objects. Automatic checking of linearizability is challenging because it requires checking that: (1) All executions of concurrent operations are serializable, and (2) the serialized executions are correct with respect to the sequential semantics. In this work, we describe a method to automatically check linearizability based on refinement relations from abstract specifications to concrete implementations. The method does not require that linearization points in the implementations be given, which is often difficult or impossible. However, the method takes advantage of linearization points if they are given. The method is based on refinement checking of finite-state systems specified as concurrent processes with shared variables. To tackle state space explosion, we develop and apply symmetry reduction, dynamic partial order reduction, and a combination of both for refinement checking. We have built the method into the PAT model checker, and used PAT to automatically check a variety of implementations of concurrent objects, including the first algorithm for scalable nonzero indicators. Our system is able to find all known and injected bugs in these implementations.

KuaFu: Closing the parallelism gap in database replication

Abstract: Database systems are nowadays increasingly deployed on multi-core commodity servers, with replication to guard against failures. Database engine is best designed to scale with the number of cores to offer a high degree of parallelism on a modern multi-core architecture. On the other hand, replication traditionally resorts to a certain form of serialization for data consistency among replicas. In the widely used primary/backup replication with log shipping, concurrent executions on the primary and the serialized log replay on a backup creates a serious parallelism gap. Our experiment on MySQL with a 16-core configuration shows that the serial replay of a backup can sustain only less than one third of the throughput achievable on the primary under an OLTP workload. This paper proposes KuaFu to close the parallelism gap on replicated database systems by enabling concurrent replay of transactions on a backup. KuaFu maintains write consistency on backups by tracking transaction dependencies. Concurrent replay on a backup does introduce read inconsistency between the primary and backups. KuaFu further leverages multi-version concurrency control to produce snapshots in order to restore the consistency semantics. We have implemented KuaFu on MySQL; our evaluations show that KuaFu allows a backup to keep up with the primary while preserving replication consistency.

Formal Design and Verification of Long-Running Transactions with Extensible Coordination Tools

Abstract: Ensuring transactional behavior of business processes and web service compositions is an essential issue in the area of service-oriented computing. Transactions in this context may require long periods of time to complete and must be managed using nonblocking techniques. Data integrity in long-running transactions (LRTs) is preserved using compensations, that is, activities explicitly programmed to eliminate the effects of a process terminated by a user or that failed to complete due to another reason. In this paper, we present a framework for behavioral modeling of business processes, focusing on their transactional properties. Our solution is based on the channel-based coordination language Reo, which is an expressive, compositional, and semantically precise design language admitting formal reasoning. The operational semantics of Reo is given by constraint automata (CA). We illustrate how Reo can be used for modeling termination and compensation handling in a number of commonly used workflow patterns, including sequential and parallel compositions, nested transactions, discriminator choice and concurrent flows with link dependences. Furthermore, we show how essential properties of LRTs can be expressed in LTL and CTL-like logics and verified using model checking technology. Our framework is supported by a number of Eclipse plug-ins that provides facilities for modeling, animation, and verification of LRTs to generate executable code for them.

M-Lock: Accelerating Distributed Transactions on Key-Value Stores through Dynamic Lock Localization

Abstract: Scalable distributed data-stores are increasingly used for storing large datasets in diverse applications. The need for transactional support in these applications has motivated several recent efforts. A common theme underlying these efforts is the creation of disjoint groups of objects (entity-groups) on which efficient local transactional support is provided using multi-version concurrency control. A lock-based protocol is used to support distributed transactions across entity-groups. A significant drawback of this scheme is that the latency of distributed transactions increases with the number of entity-groups it operates on. This is due to the commit overhead of local transactions, and network overhead due to distributed locks. We address this problem using lock-localization -- locks for distributed objects are dynamically migrated and placed in distinct entity-groups in the same datastore. This reduces the overhead of multiple local transactions while acquiring locks. Application-oriented clustering of locks in these new entity-groups leads to a decrease in network overhead. Separating locks from data in this manner, however, affects the latency of local transactions. To account for this, we propose protocols and policies for selective, adaptive, and dynamic migration of locks. Using TPC-C benchmark, we provide detailed evaluation of the system.

Concurrency Control in Distributed Database System

Abstract: This paper reviews the coverage of concurrency control in Distributed Network. A distributed network becomes more popular, the need for improvement in distributed database management systems becomes even more important. The main challenges are identified as-: (1)Preserving the ACID property atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability property when concurrent transactions perform read and write operation; (2) provides recovery method when distributed data is fail; (3)whatever method that is chosen they must provide feasible solutions with respect to performance.

Parallel implementation of real-time semi-global matching on embedded multi-core architectures

Abstract: Embedded real-time algorithms are often realized with dedicated hardware, exhibiting high production costs and low programming flexibility thereafter. For instance, semi-global matching for stereo image processing, including complex data flows, traditionally runs on customized hardware modules. Combining the processing and memory capabilities of multiple individual cores, emerging embedded multi-core technologies address these problems. However, considering concurrency issues (e.g., data races and lock contentions), parallel programming requires experienced programmers and technology-specific techniques (e.g., synchronization libraries) and tools (e.g., parallel profilers), which are often not available on embedded platforms. In this work, we introduce a parallel version of a semi-global matching algorithm and demonstrate within this case study runtime optimizations necessary to meet real-time requirements. We also show structured steps of the applied parallelization workflow, illustrating an efficient migration strategy to multi-core platforms using runtime information (e.g., profiles and hardware counters). Finally, to evaluate the resulting performance characteristics, we compare the runtime behavior of the parallel version running on a Freescale P4080 processor with reference values taken on an Intel i7, a field-programmable logic device, an extended general purpose processor and a GPU.

Detecting deadlock in programs with data-centric synchronization

Abstract: Previously, we developed a data-centric approach to concurrency control in which programmers specify synchronization constraints declaratively, by grouping shared locations into atomic sets. We implemented our ideas in a Java extension called AJ, using Java locks to implement synchronization. We proved that atomicity violations are prevented by construction, and demonstrated that realistic Java programs can be refactored into AJ without significant loss of performance. This paper presents an algorithm for detecting possible dead- lock in AJ programs by ordering the locks associated with atomic sets. In our approach, a type-based static analysis is extended to handle recursive data structures by considering programmer- supplied, compiler-verified lock ordering annotations. In an eval- uation of the algorithm, all 10 AJ programs under consideration were shown to be deadlock-free. One program needed 4 ordering annotations and 2 others required minor refactorings. For the remaining 7 programs, no programmer intervention of any kind was required.

Identification of concurrent control chart patterns with singular spectrum analysis and learning vector quantization

Abstract: Identification of unnatural control chart patterns (CCPs) from manufacturing process measurements is a critical task in quality control as these patterns indicate that the manufacturing process is out-of-control. Recently, there have been numerous efforts in developing pattern recognition and classification methods based on artificial neural network to automatically recognize unnatural patterns. Most of them assume that a single type of unnatural pattern exists in process data. Due to this restrictive assumption, severe performance degradations are observed in these methods when unnatural concurrent CCPs present in process data. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel approach based on singular spectrum analysis (SSA) and learning vector quantization network to identify concurrent CCPs. The main advantage of the proposed method is that it can be applied to the identification of concurrent CCPs in univariate manufacturing processes. Moreover, there are no permutation and scaling ambiguities in the CCPs recovered by the SSA. These desirable features make the proposed algorithm an attractive alternative for the identification of concurrent CCPs. Computer simulations and a real application for aluminium smelting processes confirm the superior performance of proposed algorithm for sets of typical concurrent CCPs.

SYNCTRACE: Visual thread-interplay analysis

Abstract: In software comprehension, program traces are important to gain insight into certain aspects of concurrent runtime behavior, e.g., thread-interplay. Here, key tasks are finding usages of blocking operations, such as synchronization and I/O operations, assessing temporal order of such operations, and analyzing their effects. This is a hard task for large and complex program traces due to their size and number of threads involved. In this paper, we present SYNCTRACE a new visualization technique based on (bended) activity diagrams and edge bundles that allows for parallel analysis of multiple threads and their inter-thread correspondences. We demonstrate how the technique, implemented as a tool, can be applied on real-world trace datasets to support understanding concurrent behavior.

On the Recovery of R-Trees

Abstract: We consider the recoverability of traditional R-tree index structures under concurrent updating transactions, an important issue that is neglected or treated inadequately in many proposals of R-tree concurrency control. We present two solutions to ARIES-based recovery of transactions on R-trees. These assume a standard fine-grained single-version update model with physiological write-ahead logging and steal-and-no-force buffering where records with uncommitted updates by a transaction may migrate from their original page to another page due to structure modifications caused by other transactions. Both solutions guarantee that an R-tree will remain in a consistent and balanced state in the presence of any number of concurrent forward-rolling and (totally or partially) backward-rolling multiaction transactions and in the event of process failures and system crashes. One solution maintains the R-tree in a strictly consistent state in which the bounding rectangles of pages are as tight as possible, while in the other solution this requirement is relaxed. In both solutions only a small constant number of simultaneous exclusive latches (write latches) are needed, and in the solution that only maintains relaxed consistency also the number of simultaneous nonexclusive latches is similarly limited. In both solutions, deletions are handled uniformly with insertions, and a logarithmic insertion-path length is maintained under all circumstances.

SenSmart: Adaptive Stack Management for Multitasking Sensor Networks

Abstract: The networked application environment has motivated the development of multitasking operating systems for sensor networks and other low-power electronic devices, but their multitasking capability is severely limited because traditional stack management techniques perform poorly on small-memory systems without virtual memory support In this paper, we show that combining binary translation and a new kernel runtime can lead to efficient OS designs on resource constrained platforms We introduce SenSmart, a multitasking OS for sensor networks, and present new OS design techniques for supporting preemptive multitask scheduling, memory isolation, and adaptive stack management Our solution provides memory isolation and automatic stack relocation on usual sensornet platforms The adaptive stack management frees programmers from the burden of estimating tasks' stack usage, yet it enables SenSmart to schedule and run more tasks than other multitasking OSes for sensor networks We have implemented SenSmart on MICA2/MICAz motes Evaluation shows that SenSmart has a significantly better capability in managing concurrent tasks than other sensornet operating systems