I can’t believe it’s not causal! Scalable causal consistency with no slowdown cascades

Syed Akbar Mehdi, Cody Littley, Natacha Crooks, Lorenzo Alvisi, Nathan Bronson, Wyatt Lloyd

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

65 Scopus citations

Abstract

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of Occult (Observable Causal Consistency Using Lossy Timestamps), the first scalable, geo-replicated data store that provides causal consistency to its clients without exposing the system to the possibility of slowdown cascades, a key obstacle to the deployment of causal consistency at scale. Occult supports read/write transactions under PC-PSI, a variant of Parallel Snapshot Isolation that contributes to Occult’s immunity to slowdown cascades by weakening how PSI replicates transactions committed at the same replica. While PSI insists that they all be totally ordered, PC-PSI simply requires total order Per Client session. Nonetheless, Occult guarantees that all transactions read from a causally consistent snapshot of the datastore without requiring any coordination in how transactions are asynchronously replicated.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2017
PublisherUSENIX Association
Pages453-468
Number of pages16
ISBN (Electronic)9781931971379
StatePublished - Jan 1 2017
Event14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2017 - Boston, United States
Duration: Mar 27 2017Mar 29 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2017

Conference

Conference14th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoston
Period3/27/173/29/17

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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