@inproceedings{katsarakis2021zeus,
author = {Katsarakis, Antonios and Ma, Yijun and Tan, Zhaowei and Bainbridge, Andrew and Balkwill, Matthew and Dragojevic, Aleksandar and Grot, Boris and Radunovic, Bozidar and Zhang, Yongguang},
title = {Zeus: Locality-aware Distributed Transactions},
booktitle = {Eurosys},
year = {2021},
month = {April},
abstract = {State-of-the-art distributed in-memory datastores (FaRM, FaSST, DrTM) provide strongly-consistent distributed transactions with high performance and availability. Transactions in those systems are fully general; they can atomically manipulate any set of objects in the  store, regardless of their location. To achieve this, these systems use complex distributed transactional protocols. Meanwhile, many workloads have a high degree of locality. For such workloads, distributed transactions are an overkill as most operations only access objects located on the same server – if sharded appropriately.

In this paper, we show that for these workloads, a single-node transactional protocol combined with dynamic object re-sharding and asynchronously pipelined replication can provide the same level of generality with better performance, simpler protocols, and lower developer effort. We present Zeus, an in-memory distributed datastore that provides general transactions by acquiring all objects involved in the transaction to the same server and executing a single-node transaction on them. Zeus is fault-tolerant and strongly consistent. At the heart of Zeus is a reliable dynamic object sharding protocol that can move 250K objects per second per server, allowing Zeus to process millions of transactions per second and outperform more traditional distributed transactions on a wide range of workloads that exhibit locality.},
publisher = {ACM},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/zeus-locality-aware-distributed-transactions/},
}