Localized Validation Accelerates Distributed Transactions on Disaggregated Persistent Memory

Abstract

Persistent memory (PM) disaggregation significantly improves the resource utilization and failure isolation to build a scalable and cost-effective remote memory pool in modern data centers. However, due to offering limited computing power and overlooking the bandwidth and persistence properties of real PMs, existing distributed transaction schemes, which are designed for legacy DRAM-based monolithic servers, fail to efficiently work on the disaggregated PM. In this article, we propose FORD, a Fast One-sided RDMA-based Distributed transaction system for the new disaggregated PM architecture. FORD thoroughly leverages one-sided remote direct memory access to handle transactions for bypassing the remote CPU in the PM pool. To reduce the round trips, FORD batches the read and lock operations into one request to eliminate extra locking and validations for the read-write data. To accelerate the transaction commit, FORD updates all remote replicas in a single round trip with parallel undo logging and data visibility control. Moreover, considering the limited PM bandwidth, FORD enables the backup replicas to be read to alleviate the load on the primary replicas, thus improving the throughput. To efficiently guarantee the remote data persistency in the PM pool, FORD selectively flushes data to the backup replicas to mitigate the network overheads. Nevertheless, the original FORD wastes some validation round trips if the read-only data are not modified by other transactions. Hence, we further propose a localized validation scheme to transfer the validation operations for the read-only data from remote to local as much as possible to reduce the round trips. Experimental results demonstrate that FORD significantly improves the transaction throughput by up to 3× and decreases the latency by up to 87.4% compared with state-of-the-art systems.