article

Transactors: a programming model for maintaining globally consistent distributed state in unreliable environments

Authors:

Carlos A. VarelaAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 40, Issue 1

Pages 195 - 208

https://doi.org/10.1145/1047659.1040322

Published: 12 January 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We introduce transactors, a fault-tolerant programming model for composing loosely-coupled distributed components running in an unreliable environment such as the internet into systems that reliably maintain globally consistent distributed state. The transactor model incorporates certain elements of traditional transaction processing, but allows these elements to be composed in different ways without the need for central coordination, thus facilitating the study of distributed fault-tolerance from a semantic point of view. We formalize our approach via the τ-calculus, an extended lambda-calculus based on the actor model, and illustrate its usage through a number of examples. The τ-calculus incorporates constructs which distributed processes can use to create globally-consistent checkpoints. We provide an operational semantics for the τ-calculus, and formalize the following safety and liveness properties: first, we show that globally-consistent checkpoints have equivalent execution traces without any node failures or application-level failures, and second, we show that it is possible to reach globally-consistent checkpoints provided that there is some bounded failure-free interval during which checkpointing can occur.

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Nishida NPalacios AVidal G(2017)A Reversible Semantics for ErlangLogic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_15(259-274)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2017
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Transactors: a programming model for maintaining globally consistent distributed state in unreliable environments

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 40, Issue 1

Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages

January 2005

391 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1047659

Issue’s Table of Contents

POPL '05: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
January 2005
402 pages
ISBN:158113830X
DOI:10.1145/1040305
General Chair:
Jens Palsberg
University of California, Los Angeles, CA
,
Program Chair:
Martín Abadi
University of California, Santa Cruz, CA

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 12 January 2005

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 40, Issue 1

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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68972-2_8
Nishida NPalacios AVidal G(2017)A Reversible Semantics for ErlangLogic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_15(259-274)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_15
Sang BPetri GArdekani MRavi SEugster P(2016)Programming Scalable Cloud Services with AEONProceedings of the 17th International Middleware Conference10.1145/2988336.2988352(1-14)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2988336.2988352
Kuang PField JVarela CBoix EHaller PRicci AVarela C(2014)Fault Tolerant Distributed Computing Using Asynchronous Local CheckpointingProceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Programming based on Actors Agents & Decentralized Control10.1145/2687357.2687364(81-93)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2687357.2687364
Koutavas VSpaccasassi CHennessy M(2014)Bisimulations for Communicating TransactionsFoundations of Software Science and Computation Structures10.1007/978-3-642-54830-7_21(320-334)Online publication date: 2014
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