Self-Recoverable and Highly Available Data Structures for NVRAM-centric Database Systems

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Lehner
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 318788683

The advent of new hardware technologies and architectures, such as Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM), Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM), Remote Direct Access Memory (RDMA), and heterogeneous cores, is driving a necessary rethink of existing database architectures to leverage the new opportunities brought by advancement in hardware technology. In this proposal, we focus on the impact of NVRAM on database architectures, in particular on fundamental research on database data structures for NVRAM. We plan to devise highly available hybrid data structures that close the gap between persistent memory and volatile memory. On the one hand, we aim to make these data structures crash-safe, i.e., self-recoverable from any software or hardware crash scenario, such that they can be used for both read and write operations after a restart with minimal recovery effort. On the other hand, we intent to design highly scalable concurrency schemes that are coupled with the any-point crash recovery and fine-grained replication techniques that are necessary to devise in order to achieve the former goal. Special emphasis will be placed on experimental evaluation and system integration for end-to-end scenarios.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants