Ares II: Tracing the Flaws of a (Storage) God

TL;DR

Ares II enhances a modular distributed shared memory framework by identifying bottlenecks through tracing, then applying optimizations like piggybacking, garbage collection, and batching to improve performance and storage efficiency, with proven correctness.

Contribution

This work introduces Ares II, a significantly optimized version of Ares, with new mechanisms for performance and storage improvements, validated through rigorous correctness proofs and experimental evaluation.

Findings

Performance bottlenecks identified via distributed tracing.

Ares II achieves improved performance and storage efficiency.

Experimental results show significant improvements over original Ares.

Abstract

Ares is a modular framework, designed to implement dynamic, reconfigurable, fault-tolerant, read/write and strongly consistent distributed shared memory objects. Recent enhancements of the framework have realized the efficient implementation of large objects, by introducing versioning and data striping techniques. In this work, we identify performance bottlenecks of the Ares's variants by utilizing distributed tracing, a popular technique for monitoring and profiling distributed systems. We then propose optimizations across all versions of Ares, aiming in overcoming the identified flaws, while preserving correctness. We refer to the optimized version of Ares as Ares II, which now features a piggyback mechanism, a garbage collection mechanism, and a batching reconfiguration technique for improving the performance and storage efficiency of the original Ares. We rigorously prove the correctness of Ares II, and we demonstrate the performance improvements by an experimental comparison (via distributed tracing) of the Ares II variants with their original counterparts.