A High Throughput Atomic Storage Algorithm

This paper presents an algorithm to ensure the atomicity of a distributed storage that can be read and written by any number of clients. In failure-free and synchronous situations, and even if there is contention, our algorithm has a high write throughput and a read throughput that grows linearly with the number of available servers. The algorithm is devised with a homogeneous cluster of servers in mind. It organizes servers around a ring and assumes point-to-point communication. It is resilient to the crash failure of any number of readers and writers as well as to the crash failure of all but one server. We evaluated our algorithm on a cluster of 24 nodes with dual fast ethernet network interfaces (100 Mbps). We achieve 81 Mbps of write throughput and 8 x 90 Mbps of read throughput (with up to 8 servers) which conveys the linear scalability with the number of servers.