Efficient distributed precision control in symmetric replication environments

Maintaining strict consistency of replicated data can be prohibitively expensive for many distributed applications and environments. In order to alleviate this problem, some systems allow applications to access stale, imprecise data. Due to relaxed correctness requirements, many applications can tolerate stale data but require that the imprecision be properly bounded. This paper describes ReBound, a system that provides an adaptive framework for supporting and exploiting data precision vs. efficiency tradeoffs in symmetric replication environments via distributed precision control. Previous work proposed efficient precision control algorithms that support continuous read requests tagged with custom numerical precision ranges. ReBound generalizes and extends previous work with a new algorithm for continuous reads, support for ad-hoc reads, and light-weight adaptation mechanisms for coping with dynamically changing update patterns. This paper also presents preliminary experimental results, based on a prototype implementation, that demonstrate the performance advantages of exploiting precision vs. efficiency tradeoffs.