ARES: Adaptive, Reconfigurable, Erasure coded, atomic Storage

TL;DR

This paper introduces ARES, a framework for reconfiguring erasure-coded atomic storage systems, and presents TREAS, a new efficient algorithm for multi-writer, multi-reader atomic objects that supports dynamic server reconfiguration.

Contribution

The paper proposes the first reconfigurable erasure-coded atomic storage framework and a novel two-round algorithm TREAS for MWMR atomic objects with optimal costs.

Findings

ARES enables safe server reconfiguration without service interruption.

TREAS achieves near-optimal communication and storage costs for atomic objects.

The combined approach allows dynamic reconfiguration without passing object values through reconfiguration clients.

Abstract

Atomicity or strong consistency is one of the fundamental, most intuitive, and hardest to provide primitives in distributed shared memory emulations. To ensure survivability, scalability, and availability of a storage service in the presence of failures, traditional approaches for atomic memory emulation, in message passing environments, replicate the objects across multiple servers. Compared to replication based algorithms, erasure code-based atomic memory algorithms has much lower storage and communication costs, but usually, they are harder to design. The difficulty of designing atomic memory algorithms further grows, when the set of servers may be changed to ensure survivability of the service over software and hardware upgrades, while avoiding service interruptions. Atomic memory algorithms for performing server reconfiguration, in the replicated systems, are very few, complex, and are still part of an active area of research; reconfigurations of erasure-code based algorithms are non-existent. In this work, we present ARES, an algorithmic framework that allows reconfiguration of the underlying servers, and is particularly suitable for erasure-code based algorithms emulating atomic objects. ARES introduces new configurations while keeping the service available. To use with ARES we also propose a new, and to our knowledge, the first two-round erasure code based algorithm TREAS, for emulating multi-writer, multi-reader (MWMR) atomic objects in asynchronous, message-passing environments, with near-optimal communication and storage costs. Our algorithms can tolerate crash failures of any client and some fraction of servers, and yet, guarantee safety and liveness property. Moreover, by bringing together the advantages of ARES and TREAS, we propose an optimized algorithm where new configurations can be installed without the objects values passing through the reconfiguration clients.