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Ilya Kokorin

Publications and source records attributed to Ilya Kokorin.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Model-based Testing of Practical Distributed Systems in Actor Model

Designing and implementing distributed systems correctly can be quite challenging. Although these systems are often accompanied by formal specifications that are verified using model-checking techniques, a gap still exists between the implementation and its formal specification: there is no guarantee that the implementation is free of bugs. To bridge this gap, we can use model-based testing. Specifically, if the model of the system can be interpreted as a finite-state automaton, we can generate an exhaustive test suite for the implementation that covers all possible states and transitions. In this paper, we discuss how to efficiently generate such a test suite for distributed systems written in the actor model. Importantly, our approach does not require any modifications to the code or interfering with the distributed system execution environment. As an example, we verified an implementation of a replication algorithm based on Viewstamped Replication, which is used in a real-world system.

cs.DC

Wait-free Trees with Asymptotically-Efficient Range Queries

Tree data structures, such as red-black trees, quad trees, treaps, or tries, are fundamental tools in computer science. A classical problem in concurrency is to obtain expressive, efficient, and scalable versions of practical tree data structures. We are interested in concurrent trees supporting range queries, i.e., queries that involve multiple consecutive data items. Existing implementations with this capability can list keys in a specific range, but do not support aggregate range queries: for instance, if we want to calculate the number of keys in a range, the only choice is to retrieve a whole list and return its size. This is suboptimal: in the sequential setting, one can augment a balanced search tree with counters and, consequently, perform these aggregate requests in logarithmic rather than linear time. In this paper, we propose a generic approach to implement a broad class of range queries on concurrent trees in a way that is wait-free, asymptotically efficient, and practically scalable. The key idea is a new mechanism for maintaining metadata concurrently at tree nodes, which can be seen as a wait-free variant of hand-over-hand locking (which we call hand-over-hand helping). We implement, test, and benchmark a balanced binary search tree with wait-free insert, delete, contains, and count operations, returning the number of keys in a given range which validates the expected speedups because of our method in practice.

cs.DB

Parallel-batched Interpolation Search Tree

A sorted set (or map) is one of the most used data types in computer science. In addition to standard set operations, like Insert, Remove, and Contains, it can provide set-set operations such as Union,Intersection, and Difference. Each of these set-set operations is equivalent to some batched operation: the data structure should be able to execute Insert, Remove, and Contains on a batch of keys. It is obvious that we want these "large" operations to be parallelized. These sets are usually implemented with the trees of logarithmic height, such as 2-3 trees, treaps, AVL trees, red-black trees, etc. Until now, little attention was devoted to data structures that work asymptotically better under several restrictions on the stored data. In this work, we parallelize Interpolation Search Tree which is expected to serve requests from a smooth distribution in doubly-logarithmic time. Our data structure of size n performs a batch of m operations in O(m log log n) work and poly-log span.

cs.DC

Unexpected Scaling in Path Copying Trees

Although a wide variety of handcrafted concurrent data structures have been proposed, there is considerable interest in universal approaches (henceforth called Universal Constructions or UCs) for building concurrent data structures. These approaches (semi-)automatically convert a sequential data structure into a concurrent one. The simplest approach uses locks that protect a sequential data structure and allow only one process to access it at a time. The resulting data structures use locks, and hence are blocking. Most work on UCs instead focuses on obtaining non-blocking progress guarantees such as obstruction-freedom, lock-freedom, or wait-freedom. Many non-blocking UCs have appeared. Key examples include the seminal wait-free UC by Herlihy, a NUMA-aware UC by Yi et al., and an efficient UC for large objects by Fatourou et al. We borrow ideas from persistent data structures and multi-version concurrency control (MVCC), most notably path copying, and use them to implement concurrent versions of sequential persistent data structures. Despite our expectation that our data structures would not scale under write-heavy workloads, they scale in practice. We confirm this scaling analytically in our model with private per-process caches.

cs.DC

Parallel Batched Interpolation Search Tree

Ordered set (and map) is one of the most used data type. In addition to standard set operations, like insert, delete and contains, it can provide set-set operations such as union, intersection, and difference. Each of these set-set operations is equivalent to batched operations: the data structure should process a set of operations insert, delete, and contains. It is obvious that we want these "large" operations to be parallelized. Typically, these sets are implemented with the trees of logarithmic height, such as 2-3 tree, Treap, AVL tree, Red-Black tree, etc. Until now, little attention was devoted to data structures that work better but under several restrictions on the data. In this work, we parallelize Interpolation Search Tree which serves each request from a smooth distribution in doubly-logarithmic time. Our data structure of size $n$ performs a batch of $m$ operations in $O(m \log\log n)$ work and poly-log span.

cs.DC

Execution of NVRAM Programs with Persistent Stack

Non-Volatile Random Access Memory (NVRAM) is a novel type of hardware that combines the benefits of traditional persistent memory (persistency of data over hardware failures) and DRAM (fast random access). In this work, we describe an algorithm that can be used to execute NVRAM programs and recover the system after a hardware failure while taking the architecture of real-world NVRAM systems into account. Moreover, the algorithm can be used to execute NVRAM-destined programs on commodity persistent hardware, such as hard drives. That allows us to test NVRAM algorithms using only cheap hardware, without having access to the NVRAM. We report the usage of our algorithm to implement and test NVRAM CAS algorithm.

cs.DC