The design and implementation of a distributed transaction system based on atomic data types

The complexity of potential interactions among concurrent activities and the multitude of failure modes that can occur in distributed systems make it hard to reason about distributed programs. Transactions provide the programmer with a mechanism that simplifies the development of concurrent and distributed programs. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a distributed transaction system that uses atomic data types to provide synchronization and recovery. Generally speaking, implementing user-defined atomic data types is a difficult task. However, unlike existing systems, our system requires programmers to do very little extra work to make an object atomic. Programmers implement atomic data types as if for a sequential and reliable environment and specify the concurrent semantics of object operations separately in a small, but expressive declarative language. Appropriate synchronization and recovery code for atomic data types is generated automatically by the system according to this information.