Sinfonia

TLDR

The authors propose a new paradigm for building scalable distributed systems. They introduce Sinfonia, a service that stores application data on memory nodes with linear address spaces and provides a novel minitransaction primitive for efficient, consistent access, allowing developers to manipulate data structures without handling message‑passing protocols. Using Sinfonia, the authors implemented a cluster file system and a group communication service in a few months, achieving good performance and scaling to hundreds of machines while eliminating the need for message‑passing protocols.

Abstract

We propose a new paradigm for building scalable distributed systems. Our approach does not require dealing with message-passing protocols -- a major complication in existing distributed systems. Instead, developers just design and manipulate data structures within our service called Sinfonia. Sinfonia keeps data for applications on a set of memory nodes, each exporting a linear address space. At the core of Sinfonia is a novel minitransaction primitive that enables efficient and consistent access to data, while hiding the complexities that arise from concurrency and failures. Using Sinfonia, we implemented two very different and complex applications in a few months: a cluster file system and a group communication service. Our implementations perform well and scale to hundreds of machines.