Fault-Tolerant Distributed Transactional Memory

We present a new approach for building fault-tolerant distributed systems based on distributed transactional memory. Current practice for developing distributed systems using message passing requires developers to manually write code to recover from machine failures. Experience has shown that designing fault-tolerant distributed systems using these techniques is difficult. It has therefore largely been relegated to experts in the domain of fault-tolerant systems. We present a new fault-tolerant distributed transactional memory system designed to simplify the development of fault-tolerant distributed applications. Our system provides a powerful set of building blocks that relieve the developer from the burden of implementing the failure-prone, low-level aspects of fault-tolerance. Our approach in many cases provides fault-tolerance without any developer effort and in other cases only requires that the developer writes the relatively straightforward, application-specific recovery code. We have used our system to build five fault-tolerant applications: a distributed spam filter, a distributed web crawler, a distributed file system, a distributed multiplayer game, and a distributed computational kernel. Our results indicate that each application effectively recovers from machine failures