arXiv subjects

Divyakant Agrawal

Publications and source records attributed to Divyakant Agrawal.

31 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Towards Global Asset Management in Blockchain Systems

Permissionless blockchains (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc) have shown a wide success in implementing global scale peer-to-peer cryptocurrency systems. In such blockchains, new currency units are generated through the mining process and are used in addition to transaction fees to incentivize miners to maintain the blockchain. Although it is clear how currency units are generated and transacted on, it is unclear how to use the infrastructure of permissionless blockchains to manage other assets than the blockchain's currency units (e.g., cars, houses, etc). In this paper, we propose a global asset management system by unifying permissioned and permissionless blockchains. A governmental permissioned blockchain authenticates the registration of end-user assets through smart contract deployments on a permissionless blockchain. Afterwards, end-users can transact on their assets through smart contract function calls (e.g., sell a car, rent a room in a house, etc). In return, end-users get paid in currency units of the same blockchain or other blockchains through atomic cross-chain transactions and governmental offices receive taxes on these transactions in cryptocurrency units.

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arXiv2019

ParBlockchain: Leveraging Transaction Parallelism in Permissioned Blockchain Systems

Many existing blockchains do not adequately address all the characteristics of distributed system applications and suffer from serious architectural limitations resulting in performance and confidentiality issues. While recent permissioned blockchain systems, have tried to overcome these limitations, their focus has mainly been on workloads with no-contention, i.e., no conflicting transactions. In this paper, we introduce OXII, a new paradigm for permissioned blockchains to support distributed applications that execute concurrently. OXII is designed for workloads with (different degrees of) contention. We then present ParBlockchain, a permissioned blockchain designed specifically in the OXII paradigm. The evaluation of ParBlockchain using a series of benchmarks reveals that its performance in workloads with any degree of contention is better than the state of the art permissioned blockchain systems.

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arXiv2015

Parameter Database : Data-centric Synchronization for Scalable Machine Learning

We propose a new data-centric synchronization framework for carrying out of machine learning (ML) tasks in a distributed environment. Our framework exploits the iterative nature of ML algorithms and relaxes the application agnostic bulk synchronization parallel (BSP) paradigm that has previously been used for distributed machine learning. Data-centric synchronization complements function-centric synchronization based on using stale updates to increase the throughput of distributed ML computations. Experiments to validate our framework suggest that we can attain substantial improvement over BSP while guaranteeing sequential correctness of ML tasks.

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arXiv2015

Adaptive Logging for Distributed In-memory Databases

A new type of logs, the command log, is being employed to replace the traditional data log (e.g., ARIES log) in the in-memory databases. Instead of recording how the tuples are updated, a command log only tracks the transactions being executed, thereby effectively reducing the size of the log and improving the performance. Command logging on the other hand increases the cost of recovery, because all the transactions in the log after the last checkpoint must be completely redone in case of a failure. In this paper, we first extend the command logging technique to a distributed environment, where all the nodes can perform recovery in parallel. We then propose an adaptive logging approach by combining data logging and command logging. The percentage of data logging versus command logging becomes an optimization between the performance of transaction processing and recovery to suit different OLTP applications. Our experimental study compares the performance of our proposed adaptive logging, ARIES-style data logging and command logging on top of H-Store. The results show that adaptive logging can achieve a 10x boost for recovery and a transaction throughput that is comparable to that of command logging.

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arXiv2015

DGCC:A New Dependency Graph based Concurrency Control Protocol for Multicore Database Systems

Multicore CPUs and large memories are increasingly becoming the norm in modern computer systems. However, current database management systems (DBMSs) are generally ineffective in exploiting the parallelism of such systems. In particular, contention can lead to a dramatic fall in performance. In this paper, we propose a new concurrency control protocol called DGCC (Dependency Graph based Concurrency Control) that separates concurrency control from execution. DGCC builds dependency graphs for batched transactions before executing them. Using these graphs, contentions within the same batch of transactions are resolved before execution. As a result, the execution of the transactions does not need to deal with contention while maintaining full equivalence to that of serialized execution. This better exploits multicore hardware and achieves higher level of parallelism. To facilitate DGCC, we have also proposed a system architecture that does not have certain centralized control components yielding better scalability, as well as supports a more efficient recovery mechanism. Our extensive experimental study shows that DGCC achieves up to four times higher throughput compared to that of state-of-the-art concurrency control protocols for high contention workloads.

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arXiv2013

Scalable Data Cube Analysis over Big Data

Data cubes are widely used as a powerful tool to provide multidimensional views in data warehousing and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP). However, with increasing data sizes, it is becoming computationally expensive to perform data cube analysis. The problem is exacerbated by the demand of supporting more complicated aggregate functions (e.g. CORRELATION, Statistical Analysis) as well as supporting frequent view updates in data cubes. This calls for new scalable and efficient data cube analysis systems. In this paper, we introduce HaCube, an extension of MapReduce, designed for efficient parallel data cube analysis on large-scale data by taking advantages from both MapReduce (in terms of scalability) and parallel DBMS (in terms of efficiency). We also provide a general data cube materialization algorithm which is able to facilitate the features in MapReduce-like systems towards an efficient data cube computation. Furthermore, we demonstrate how HaCube supports view maintenance through either incremental computation (e.g. used for SUM or COUNT) or recomputation (e.g. used for MEDIAN or CORRELATION). We implement HaCube by extending Hadoop and evaluate it based on the TPC-D benchmark over billions of tuples on a cluster with over 320 cores. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency, scalability and practicality of HaCube for cube analysis over a large amount of data in a distributed environment.

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arXiv2012

Serializability, not Serial: Concurrency Control and Availability in Multi-Datacenter Datastores

We present a framework for concurrency control and availability in multi-datacenter datastores. While we consider Google's Megastore as our motivating example, we define general abstractions for key components, making our solution extensible to any system that satisfies the abstraction properties. We first develop and analyze a transaction management and replication protocol based on a straightforward implementation of the Paxos algorithm. Our investigation reveals that this protocol acts as a concurrency prevention mechanism rather than a concurrency control mechanism. We then propose an enhanced protocol called Paxos with Combination and Promotion (Paxos-CP) that provides true transaction concurrency while requiring the same per instance message complexity as the basic Paxos protocol. Finally, we compare the performance of Paxos and Paxos-CP in a multi-datacenter experimental study, and we demonstrate that Paxos-CP results in significantly fewer aborted transactions than basic Paxos.

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arXiv2012

LogBase: A Scalable Log-structured Database System in the Cloud

Numerous applications such as financial transactions (e.g., stock trading) are write-heavy in nature. The shift from reads to writes in web applications has also been accelerating in recent years. Write-ahead-logging is a common approach for providing recovery capability while improving performance in most storage systems. However, the separation of log and application data incurs write overheads observed in write-heavy environments and hence adversely affects the write throughput and recovery time in the system. In this paper, we introduce LogBase - a scalable log-structured database system that adopts log-only storage for removing the write bottleneck and supporting fast system recovery. LogBase is designed to be dynamically deployed on commodity clusters to take advantage of elastic scaling property of cloud environments. LogBase provides in-memory multiversion indexes for supporting efficient access to data maintained in the log. LogBase also supports transactions that bundle read and write operations spanning across multiple records. We implemented the proposed system and compared it with HBase and a disk-based log-structured record-oriented system modeled after RAMCloud. The experimental results show that LogBase is able to provide sustained write throughput, efficient data access out of the cache, and effective system recovery.

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arXiv2010

ElasTraS: An Elastic Transactional Data Store in the Cloud

Over the last couple of years, "Cloud Computing" or "Elastic Computing" has emerged as a compelling and successful paradigm for internet scale computing. One of the major contributing factors to this success is the elasticity of resources. In spite of the elasticity provided by the infrastructure and the scalable design of the applications, the elephant (or the underlying database), which drives most of these web-based applications, is not very elastic and scalable, and hence limits scalability. In this paper, we propose ElasTraS which addresses this issue of scalability and elasticity of the data store in a cloud computing environment to leverage from the elastic nature of the underlying infrastructure, while providing scalable transactional data access. This paper aims at providing the design of a system in progress, highlighting the major design choices, analyzing the different guarantees provided by the system, and identifying several important challenges for the research community striving for computing in the cloud.

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arXiv2005

Distributed Navigation Algorithms for Sensor Networks

We propose efficient distributed algorithms to aid navigation of a user through a geographic area covered by sensors. The sensors sense the level of danger at their locations and we use this information to find a safe path for the user through the sensor field. Traditional distributed navigation algorithms rely upon flooding the whole network with packets to find an optimal safe path. To reduce the communication expense, we introduce the concept of a skeleton graph which is a sparse subset of the true sensor network communication graph. Using skeleton graphs we show that it is possible to find approximate safe paths with much lower communication cost. We give tight theoretical guarantees on the quality of our approximation and by simulation, show the effectiveness of our algorithms in realistic sensor network situations.

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arXiv2004

Power Aware Routing for Sensor Databases

Wireless sensor networks offer the potential to span and monitor large geographical areas inexpensively. Sensor network databases like TinyDB are the dominant architectures to extract and manage data in such networks. Since sensors have significant power constraints (battery life), and high communication costs, design of energy efficient communication algorithms is of great importance. The data flow in a sensor database is very different from data flow in an ordinary network and poses novel challenges in designing efficient routing algorithms. In this work we explore the problem of energy efficient routing for various different types of database queries and show that in general, this problem is NP-complete. We give a constant factor approximation algorithm for one class of query, and for other queries give heuristic algorithms. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms by simulation and demonstrate their near optimal performance for various network sizes.

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arXiv2004

Medians and Beyond: New Aggregation Techniques for Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks offer the potential to span and monitor large geographical areas inexpensively. Sensors, however, have significant power constraint (battery life), making communication very expensive. Another important issue in the context of sensor-based information systems is that individual sensor readings are inherently unreliable. In order to address these two aspects, sensor database systems like TinyDB and Cougar enable in-network data aggregation to reduce the communication cost and improve reliability. The existing data aggregation techniques, however, are limited to relatively simple types of queries such as SUM, COUNT, AVG, and MIN/MAX. In this paper we propose a data aggregation scheme that significantly extends the class of queries that can be answered using sensor networks. These queries include (approximate) quantiles, such as the median, the most frequent data values, such as the consensus value, a histogram of the data distribution, as well as range queries. In our scheme, each sensor aggregates the data it has received from other sensors into a fixed (user specified) size message. We provide strict theoretical guarantees on the approximation quality of the queries in terms of the message size. We evaluate the performance of our aggregation scheme by simulation and demonstrate its accuracy, scalability and low resource utilization for highly variable input data sets.

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arXiv2003

A Game Theoretic Framework for Incentives in P2P Systems

Peer-To-Peer (P2P) networks are self-organizing, distributed systems, with no centralized authority or infrastructure. Because of the voluntary participation, the availability of resources in a P2P system can be highly variable and unpredictable. In this paper, we use ideas from Game Theory to study the interaction of strategic and rational peers, and propose a differential service-based incentive scheme to improve the system's performance.

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