A Low Overhead Logging Scheme for Fast Recovery in Distributed Shared Memory Systems

This paper presents an efficient, writer-based logging scheme for recoverable distributed shared memory systems, in which logging of a data item is performed by its writer process, instead of every process that accesses the item logging it. Since the writer process maintains the log of data items, volatile storage can be used for logging. Only the readers' access information needs to be logged into the stable storage of the writer process to tolerate multiple failures. Moreover, to reduce the frequency of stable logging, only the data items accessed by multiple processes are logged with their access information when the items are invalidated, and also semantic-based optimization in logging is considered. Compared with the earlier schemes in which stable logging was performed whenever a new data item was accessed or written by a process, the size of the log and the logging frequency can be significantly reduced in the proposed scheme.