MixT: A Language for Mixing Consistency in Geodistributed Transactions
Programming concurrent, distributed systems is hard—especially when these systems mutate shared, persistent state replicated at geographic scale. To enable high availability and scalability, a new class of weakly consistent data stores has become popular. However, some data needs strong consistency. To manipulate both weakly and strongly consistent data in a single transaction, we introduce a new abstraction: mixed-consistency transactions, embodied in a new embedded language, MixT. Programmers explicitly associate consistency models with remote storage sites; each atomic, isolated transaction can access a mixture of data with different consistency models. Compile-time information-flow checking, applied to consistency models, ensures that these models are mixed safely and enables the compiler to automatically partition transactions into a single sub-transaction per consistency model. New run-time mechanisms ensure that consistency models can also be mixed safely, even when the data used by a transaction resides on separate, mutually unaware stores. Performance measurements show that despite their stronger guarantees, mixed-consistency transactions retain much of the speed of weak consistency, significantly outperforming traditional serializable transactions.
Wed 20 JunDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
16:10 - 17:25 | Transactions and RacesPLDI Research Papers at Grand Ballroom AB Chair(s): Tatiana Shpeisman Google Brain | ||
16:10 25mTalk | The Semantics of Transactions and Weak Memory in x86, Power, ARM, and C++ PLDI Research Papers Nathan Chong ARM Ltd., Tyler Sorensen Imperial College London, John Wickerson Imperial College London Media Attached | ||
16:35 25mTalk | MixT: A Language for Mixing Consistency in Geodistributed Transactions PLDI Research Papers Media Attached | ||
17:00 25mTalk | Bounding Data Races in Space and Time PLDI Research Papers Stephen Dolan University of Cambridge, KC Sivaramakrishnan University of Cambridge, Anil Madhavapeddy OCaml Labs Media Attached |