P.T.: Atomic RMI: a Distributed Transactional Memory Framework

Abstract This paper presents Atomic RMI, a distributed transactional mem-ory framework that supports the control flow model of execution. Atomic RMI extends Java RMI with distributed transactions that can run on many Java Virtual Machines located on different network nodes. Our system employs SVA, a fully-pessimistic concurrency control algorithm that provides exclu-sive access to shared objects and supports rollback and fault tolerance. SVA is capable of achieving a relatively high level of parallelism by interweaving trans-actions that access the same objects and by making transactions that do not share objects independent of one another. It also allows any operations within transactions, including irrevocable ones, like system calls, and provides an un-obtrusive API. Our evaluation shows that in most cases Atomic RMI performs better than fine grained mutual-exclusion and read/write locking mechanisms. Atomic RMI also performs better than an optimistic transactional memory in environments with high contention and a high ratio of write operations, while being competitive otherwise. Keywords concurrency control · distributed systems · software transactional memory