Pisces: a scalable and efficient persistent transactional memory

Persistent transactional memory (PTM) programming model has recently been exploited to provide crash-consistent transactional interfaces to ease programming atop NVM. However, existing PTM designs either incur high reader-side overhead due to blocking or long delay in the writer side (efficiency), or place excessive constraints on persistent ordering (scalability).

This paper presents Pisces, a read-friendly PTM that exploits snapshot isolation (SI) on NVM. The key design of Pisces is based on two observations: the redo logs of transactions can be reused as newer versions for the data, and an intuitive MVCC-based design has read deficiency. Based on the observations, we propose a dual-version concurrency control (DVCC) protocol that maintains up to two versions in NVM-backed storage hierarchy. Together with a three-stage commit protocol, Pisces ensures SI and allows more transactions to commit and persist simultaneously. Most importantly, it promises a desired feature: hiding NVM persistence overhead from reads and allowing nearly non-blocking reads.

Experimental evaluation on an Intel 40-thread (20-core) machine with real NVM equipped shows that Pisces outperforms the state-of-the-art design (i.e., DUDETM) by up to 6.3× for micro-benchmarks and 4.6× for TPC-C new order transaction, and also scales much better. The persistency cost is from 19% to 50% for 40 threads.