Simulation of partial replication in Distributed Transactional Memory

Abstract

Distributed Transactional Memory (DTM) is a concurrency mechanism aimed at simplifying distributed programming by allowing operations to execute atomically, mirroring the well-known transaction model of relational databases. DTM can play a fundamental role in the coordination of participants in mobile distributed applications. Most DTM solutions follow a full replication scheme, in spite of recent studies showing that partial replication approaches can present gains in scalability by reducing the amount of data stored at each node. This paper investigates the role of replica location in DTMs. The goal is to understand the effect of latency on the DTM's system performance in face of judicious replica distribution, taking into consideration the locations where data is more frequently accessed.