Versioned transactional shared memory for the FénixEDU web application

ABSTRACT

The FénixEDU system uses a novel infrastructure for web applications based on the Versioned Software Transactional Memory (VSTM) abstraction. The FénixEDU system has been deployed and is currently in operation in different facilities, including the Instituto Superior Técnico where it serves the entire academic community, processing between 1,000,000 and 4,500,000 transactions per day.

This paper describes the ongoing work on the infrastructure support, in order to increase its scalability and fault-tolerance. For that purpose we are developing a distributed version of the VSTM, such that multiple application servers can concurrently serve different request and still coordinate in an efficient manner to provide strong consistency guarantees to the applications.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.2 Storage Management
          Subjects: Distributed memories

Additional Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.3 MEMORY STRUCTURES
      B.3.2 Design Styles
          Subjects: Shared memory

  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.5 Reliability
          Subjects: Fault-tolerance
      D.4.7 Organization and Design
          Subjects: Distributed systems
      D.4.8 Performance

General Terms:
Design, Management, Performance, Reliability

Keywords:
distributed shared memory, fault tolerance, replication, software transactional memory