Evaluating a dependable sharable atomic data service on a planetary-scale network

Abstract

Practical implementations of atomically consistent read/write memory service are important building blocks for higher level applications. This is especially true when data accessibility and survivability are provided by a distributed platform consisting of networked nodes, where both nodes and connections are subject to failure. This work presents an experimental evaluation of the practicality of an atomic memory service implementation, called RA M B O , which is the first to support multiple reader, multiple writer access to the atomic data with an integrated reconfiguration protocol to replace the underlying set of replicas without any interruption of the ongoing operations. Theoretical guarantees of this service are well understood

however, only rudimentary analytical performance along with limited LAN testing were performed on the implementation of RA M B O - neither representing any realistic deployment setting. In order to assess true practicality of the RA M B O service, we devised a series of experiments tested on PlanetLab - a planetary-scale research WAN network. Our experiments show that RA M B O 's performance is reasonable (under the tested scenarios) and under the somewhat extreme conditions of PlanetLab. This demonstrates the feasibility of developing dependable reconfigurable sharable data services with provable consistency guarantees on unreliable distributed systems. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.