An Atomic-Multicast Service for Scalable In-Memory Transaction Systems

Atomic Multicasts are central to the management of replicated data in distributed systems. Previous work has proven the effectiveness of utilising atomic multicasts, opposed to the classic two-phase commit, to coordinate transactions in in-memory databases. However, the current family of protocols utilised by such systems do not scale as the number of destinations increases. We propose that atomic multicasts should not occur between database nodes, instead transaction ordering should be exposed as a service that is provided by a dedicated set of nodes. Our performance study shows a clear improvement in transaction throughput and latency as the number of participants in a transaction increases.