Granola: Low-Overhead Distributed Transaction Coordination

This paper presents Granola, a transaction coordination infrastructure for building reliable distributed storage applications. Granola provides a strong consistency model, while significantly reducing transaction coordination overhead. We introduce specific support for a new type of independent distributed transaction, which we can serialize with no locking overhead and no aborts due to write conflicts. Granola uses a novel timestamp-based coordination mechanism to order distributed transactions, offering lower latency and higher throughput than previous systems that offer strong consistency. Our experiments show that Granola has low overhead, is scalable and has high throughput. We implemented the TPC-C benchmark on Granola, and achieved 3× the throughput of a platform using a locking approach.