We are continuing work on techniques for efficiently providing
transactional consistency in distributed storage systems. Our work
involves a flexible application-level cache, TxCache, which
efficiently stores application data objects in memory, while
maintaining the transactional consistency guarantees of the underlying
storage service. TxCache builds on a new protocol that permits
applications to see slightly stale, but nevertheless consistent data.
We are currently developing a prototype of TxCache and analyzing its
performance. We are also planning to develop techniques for the
storage server to efficiently generate and distribute cache
invalidations, notifying clients when their cached data becomes stale.