PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

Decentralized Storage Consistency via Versioning Servers

Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-CS-02-180, September 2002.

Garth R. Goodson, Jay J. Wylie, Gregory R. Ganger, Michael K. Reiter

Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

This paper describes a consistency protocol that exploits versioning storage-nodes. The protocol provides linearizability with the possibility of read aborts in an asynchronous system that may suffer client and storage-node crash failures. The protocol supports both replication and erasure coding (which precludes post hoc repair of partial-writes), and avoids the excess work of two-phase commits. Versioning storage-nodes allow the protocol to avoid excess communication in the common case of no write sharing and no failures of writing clients.

KEYWORDS: Decentralized storage, consistency protocol, versioning servers, distributed file systems

FULL PAPER: pdf