ATOMIC – Seeking fastness in multiple writer multiple-reader atomic register implementations
Duration: 12 months (2010 - 2011)
Start: 15/09/2010
Project Website: http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/fastMWMR/index.html
Principal Investigator: Χρύσης Γεωργίου
Main Funding Source: Research Promotion Foundation
Total Cost: 32,040
Software and hardware failures may lead to loss of valuable data. Replication, is indinsbensable in ensuring data survaivability and availability. Data is replicated among multiple basic storage units - servers or disks. Although replication copes with loss of data, it fails to provide consistency guarantees when multiple processes access different replicas concurrently. To assess the state of the replicated data, researchers proposed various levels of consistency semantics. Atomicity is the strongest and most precise consistency semantic, and therefore the most difficult to supply in a distributed, asynchronous, failure prone setting.
Several solutions proposed atomic read or write storage implementations. However, the inherent complexity of atomicity led these approaches to incorporate excessive communication between the clients and the data replicas, deteriorating the operation latency of every read or write operation. This project investigates the operation latency of read and write operations of atomic register implementations that support multiple writers and multiple readers (MWMR). Such implementations comprise building blocks for more complex Distributed Storage Systems (DSS). Also, they can be used directly to implement distributed file systems, which are interesting on their own right.
In summary this work aims to investigate:
(a) Is it possiple to devise algorithms implementing MWMR atomic registers with low operation latency?
(b) What is the practicality of such algorithms in the context of experimental simulations and implementations in planetary scale networks?