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Title: MixT: A Language for Mixing Consistency in Geodistributed Transactions
Programming concurrent, distributed systems is hard---especially when these systems mutate shared, persistent state replicated at geographic scale. To enable high availability and scalability, a new class of weakly consistent data stores has become popular. However, some data needs strong consistency. To manipulate both weakly and strongly consistent data in a single transaction, we introduce a new abstraction: mixed-consistency transactions, embodied in a new embedded language, MixT. Programmers explicitly associate consistency models with remote storage sites; each atomic, isolated transaction can access a mixture of data with different consistency models. Compile-time information-flow checking, applied to consistency models, ensures that these models are mixed safely and enables the compiler to automatically partition transactions. New run-time mechanisms ensure that consistency models can also be mixed safely, even when the data used by a transaction resides on separate, mutually unaware stores. Performance measurements show that despite their stronger guarantees, mixed-consistency transactions retain much of the speed of weak consistency, significantly outperforming traditional serializable transactions.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1717554
NSF-PAR ID:
10059926
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
ISSN:
1531-7102
Page Range / eLocation ID:
226-241
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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