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Efficient dependency tracking for relevant events in concurrent systems

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Abstract

In a concurrent system with N processes, vector clocks of size N are used for tracking dependencies between the events. Using vectors of size N leads to scalability problems. Moreover, association of components with processes makes vector clocks cumbersome and inefficient for systems with a dynamic number of processes. We present a class of logical clock algorithms, called chain clock, for tracking dependencies between relevant events based on generalizing a process to any chain in the computation poset. Chain clocks are generally able to track dependencies using fewer than N components and also adapt automatically to systems with dynamic number of processes. We compared the performance of Dynamic Chain Clock (DCC) with vector clock for multithreaded programs in Java. With 1 % of total events being relevant events, DCC requires 10 times fewer components than vector clock and the timestamp traces are smaller by a factor of 100. For the same case, although DCC requires shared data structures, it is still 10 times faster than vector clock in our experiments. We also study the class of chain clocks which perform optimally for posets of small width and show that a single algorithm cannot perform optimally for posets of small width as well as large width.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, TX 78712, Austin, USA

    Anurag Agarwal

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin, TX 78712, Gyeonggi-do, Austin, USA

    Vijay K. Garg

Authors
  1. Anurag Agarwal
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  2. Vijay K. Garg
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Correspondence to Anurag Agarwal.

Additional information

This is a revised and extended version of the paper “Efficient Dependency Tracking for Relevant Events in Shared Memory System” which appeared in PODC 2005.

Anurag Agarwal received his B.Tech. degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 2003. He is currently a student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests include distributed systems, program verification and security.

Vijay K. Garg received his B.Tech. degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1984 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1985 and 1988, respectively. He is currently a full professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the director of the Parallel and Distributed Systems Laboratory at the University of Texas, Austin. His research interests are in the areas of distributed systems and discrete event systems. He is the author of the books Concurrent and Distributed Computing in Java (Wiley & Sons, 2004), Elements of Distributed Computing (Wiley & Sons, 2002), Principles of Distributed Systems (Kluwer, 1996) and a co-author of the book Modeling and Control of Logical Discrete Event Systems (Kluwer, 1995). Prof. Garg is also an IEEE Fellow.

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Agarwal, A., Garg, V.K. Efficient dependency tracking for relevant events in concurrent systems. Distrib. Comput. 19, 163–183 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-006-0004-y

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