SNOW revisited: Understanding when ideal READ transactions are possible

Kishori M. Konwar, Wyatt Lloyd, Haonan Lu, Nancy Lynch

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

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

READ transactions that read data distributed across servers dominate the workloads of real-world distributed storage systems. The SNOW Theorem [13] stated that ideal READ transactions that have optimal latency and the strongest guarantees - i.e., 'SNOW' READ transactions-are impossible in one specific setting that requires three or more clients: at least two readers and one writer. However, it left many open questions. We close all of these open questions with new impossibility results and new algorithms. First, we prove rigorously the result from [13] saying that it is impossible to have a READ transactions system that satisfies SNOW properties with three or more clients. The insight we gained from this proof led to teasing out the implicit assumptions that are required to state the results and also, resolving the open question regarding the possibility of SNOW with two clients. We show that it is possible to design an algorithm, where SNOW is possible in a multi-writer, single-reader (MWSR) setting when a client can send messages to other clients; on the other hand, we prove it is impossible to implement SNOW in a multi-writer, single-reader (MWSR) setting-which is more general than the two-client setting-when client-to-client communication is disallowed. We also correct the previous claim in [13] that incorrectly identified one existing system, Eiger [12], as supporting the strongest guarantees (SW) and whose read-only transactions had bounded latency. Thus, there were no previous algorithms that provided the strongest guarantees and had bounded latency. Finally, we introduce the first two algorithms to provide the strongest guarantees with bounded latency.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 IEEE 35th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages922-931
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781665440660
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2021
Event35th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2021 - Virtual, Online
Duration: May 17 2021May 21 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2021 IEEE 35th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2021

Conference

Conference35th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, IPDPS 2021
CityVirtual, Online
Period5/17/215/21/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture

Keywords

  • Distributed transactions
  • Strict-serializability

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