Smart Replication for In-memory Computations

Cloud computing enables diverse new application areas for distributed computing. Many upcoming cloud applications do not fit to simple programming models such as "embarrassing parallelism" but have complex data dependencies and require atomic operations spanning multiple objects. Some large-scale storage systems already implement atomic multiobject operations, but they do not address the complementary problem of efficiently propagating replica updates. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a smart replication protocol in the ECRAM in-memory storage, which supports atomic multi-object operations. The performance analysis shows that the adaptive mechanism requires much less bandwidth, less memory, and results in improved application performance and responsiveness.