Causal-consistent rollback in a tuple-based language

Rollback is a fundamental technique for ensuring reliability of systems, allowing one, in case of troubles, to recover a past system state. However, the definition of rollback in a concurrent/distributed scenario is quite tricky. We propose an approach based on the notion of causal-consistent revers...

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Published inJournal of logical and algebraic methods in programming Vol. 88; pp. 99 - 120
Main Authors Giachino, Elena, Lanese, Ivan, Mezzina, Claudio Antares, Tiezzi, Francesco
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier 01.04.2017
Subjects
Computer Science
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Programming Languages
reversible computation
tuple space
process algebra
Klaim
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Summary:Rollback is a fundamental technique for ensuring reliability of systems, allowing one, in case of troubles, to recover a past system state. However, the definition of rollback in a concurrent/distributed scenario is quite tricky. We propose an approach based on the notion of causal-consistent reversibility: any given past action can be undone, provided that all the actions caused by it are undone as well. Given that, we define a rollback as the minimal causal-consistent sequence of backward steps able to undo a given action. We define the semantics of such a rollback operator, and show that it satisfies the above specification. The approach that we present is quite general, but we instantiate it in the case of µKlaim, a formal coordination language based on distributed tuple spaces. We remark that this is the first definition of causal-consistent rollback in a shared-memory setting. We illustrate the use of rollback in µKlaim on a simple, but realistic, application scenario.
ISSN:2352-2208
DOI:10.1016/j.jlamp.2016.09.003