HiperTM: High performance, fault-tolerant transactional memory

Abstract

We present HiperTM, a high performance active replication protocol for fault-tolerant distributed transactional memory. The active replication processing paradigm allows transactions to execute locally, costing them only a single network communication step during transaction execution. Shared objects are replicated across all sites, avoiding remote object accesses. Replica consistency is ensured by a) OS-Paxos, an optimistic atomic broadcast layer that total-orders transactional requests, and b) SCC, a local speculative multi-version concurrency control protocol that enforces a commit order equivalent to transactions' delivery order. SCC executes write transactions serially without incurring any synchronization overhead, and runs read-only transactions in parallel (to write transactions) with non-blocking execution and abort-freedom. Our implementation reveals that HiperTM guarantees 0% of out-of-order optimistic deliveries and performance up to 3.5× better than atomic broadcast-based competitor (PaxosSTM) using the standard configuration of TPC-C benchmark.