Clustering JVMs with software transactional memory support

Affordable transparent clustering solutions to scale non-HPC applications on commodity clusters (such as Terracotta) are emerging for Java Virtual Machines (JVMs). Working in this direction, we propose the Anaconda framework as a research platform to investigate the role Transactional Memory (TM) can play in this domain. Anaconda is a software transactional memory framework that supports clustering of multiple off-the-shelf JVMs on commodity clusters. The main focus of Anaconda is to investigate the implementation of Java synchronization primitives on clusters by relying on Transactional Memory. The traditional lock based Java primitives are replaced by memory transactions and the framework is responsible for ensuring transactional coherence. The contribution of this paper is to investigate which kind of TM coherency protocol can be used in this domain and compare the Anaconda framework against the state-of-the-art Terracotta clustering technology. Furthermore, Anaconda tracks TM confl...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Christos Kotselidis, Mikel Luján, Mohammad Ansari, Konstantinos Malakasis, Behram Khan, Chris C. Kirkham, Ian Watson
• Keywords: Anaconda, Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 2010, Software Transactional Memory, Transactional Memory