Granular computing is a new style of computing where applications are composed of large numbers (thousands to millions) of very short-lived (10-100μs) tasks. Today's systems and infrastructure were designed to support millisecond-scale operations and are inadequate to meet the demands of granular computing. In this position paper we discuss the challenges of supporting granular applications, such as handling extreme bursts of activity, and we present a few initial ideas about the infrastructure required to enable granular computing, such as new mechanisms for communication and persistence.

Linearizability is the strongest form of consistency for concurrent systems, but most large-scale storage systems settle for weaker forms of consistency. RIFL provides a general-purpose mechanism for converting at-least-once RPC semantics to exactly-once semantics, thereby making it easy to turn non-linearizable operations into linearizable ones. RIFL is designed for large-scale systems and is lightweight enough to be used in low-latency environments. RIFL handles data migration by associating linearizability metadata with objects in the underlying store and migrating metadata with the corresponding objects. It uses a lease mechanism to implement garbage collection for metadata. We have implemented RIFL in the RAMCloud storage system and used it to make basic operations such as writes and atomic increments linearizable; RIFL adds only 530 ns to the 13.5 μs base latency for durable writes. We also used RIFL to construct a new multi-object transaction mechanism in RAMCloud; RIFL's facilities significantly simplified the transaction implementation. The transaction mechanism can commit simple distributed transactions in about 20 μs and it outperforms the H-Store main-memory database system for the TPC-C benchmark.

RAMCloud is a storage system that provides low-latency access to large-scale datasets. To achieve low latency, RAMCloud stores all data in DRAM at all times. To support large capacities (1PB or more), it aggregates the memories of thousands of servers into a single coherent key-value store. RAMCloud ensures the durability of DRAM-based data by keeping backup copies on secondary storage. It uses a uniform log-structured mechanism to manage both DRAM and secondary storage, which results in high performance and efficient memory usage. RAMCloud uses a polling-based approach to communication, bypassing the kernel to communicate directly with NICs; with this approach, client applications can read small objects from any RAMCloud storage server in less than 5μs, durable writes of small objects take about 13.5μs. RAMCloud does not keep multiple copies of data online; instead, it provides high availability by recovering from crashes very quickly (1 to 2 seconds). RAMCloud’s crash recovery mechanism harnesses the resources of the entire cluster working concurrently so that recovery performance scales with cluster size.