Title page for ETD etd-07312003-222045

Type of Document

Master's Thesis

Author

Desai, Nirmit Vikram,

Author's Email Address

nirmitv@yahoo.com

URN

etd-07312003-222045

Title

Scalable Distributed Concurrency Protocol with Priority Support

Degree

Master of Science

Graduate Program

Computer Science

Advisory Committee

Advisor Name	Title
Frank Mueller	Committee Chair
Gregory Byrd	Committee Member
Vincent Freeh	Committee Member

Keywords

scalable middleware services
middleware concurrency services
peer-to-peer protocol
hierarchical locking
distributed mutual exclusion

Date of Defense

2003-06-05

Availability

unrestricted

Abstract

Middleware components are becoming increasingly important as
applications share computational resources in large distributed
environments, such as web services, high-end clusters with ever larger number of
processors, computational grids and an increasingly large server farms.
One of the main challenges in such environments is to
achieve scalability of synchronization. Another challenge is posed by
requirement for
shared resources with a need for QoS and real-time suppoprt.
In general, concurrency
services arbitrate resource requests in distributed systems. But
concurrency protocols currently lack scalability and support for service
differentiation based on QoS requirements.
Adding such guarantees enables resource sharing and computing with
distributed objects in systems with a large number of nodes and supporting
a wide range of QoS metrics.

The objective of this thesis is to enhance middleware services to provide
scalability of synchronization and
to support service differentiation based on priorities.
We have designed and implemented middleware
protocols in support of these objectives. Its essence is a novel, peer-to-peer,
fully decentralized
protocol for multi-mode hierarchical locking, which is applicable to
transaction-style processing and distributed agreement.

We discuss the design and implementation details of the protocols and demonstrate
high scalability combined with low response times in high-performance
cluster environments as well as TCP/IP networks when compared to a prior protocol
for distributed synchronization.
The prioritized version of the
protocol is shown to offer differentiated response times to real-time applications
with support for protocols to bound priority inversion
such as PCEP and PIP.

ur approach was originally motivated by CORBA concurrency services.
Beyond CORBA, its principles are shown
to provide benefits to general distributed concurrency services and
transaction models. Besides its technical strengths, our approach is
intriguing due to its simplicity and its wide applicability, ranging
from large-scale clusters to server-style computing and real-time applications.
In general, the results of this thesis impact applications sharing
resources across large distributed environments ranging from
hierarchical locking in real-time databases and database transactions
to distributed object environments in large-scale embedded systems including
real-time applications.

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