Applying aspect oriented programming to distributed storage metadata management

Abstract

High performance computing applications often must handle on the order of peta bytes of data during their operation. Such large data sets inherently require distributed storage. Emerging distributed storage solutions in this realm, such as our L-Store framework, virtualize the distributed nature of the storage by offering the notion of a single file system to applications. These virtualization schemes must manage substantial amount of metadata to handle the data sets across the distributed storage. Apart from the primary concern of virtualization, a number of secondary but crosscutting concerns related to transaction and persistence control, database connection pooling, authentication and authorization, and logging must be addressed in these metadata management schemes. This paper describes our investigations into discovering these secondary and crosscutting concerns in metadata management for large-scale distributed data storage. We describe how we have applied AspectJ to address these crosscutting concerns in metadata management for the L-store distributed storage framework.

A comparative analysis of database connection pooling implementations with emphasis on the added value of aspect orientation

“…In section IV we present the results and the analysis of the results in section V. The summary of the results, final remarks and conclusions and directions for further work are in sections VI, VII and VIII, respectively. II. RELATED WORK The work done in [5] describes database connections pooling as one of the main crosscutting concerns in distributed software applications. In their work, database connections pooling, and authentication and authorization were all formulated as aspects.…”

“…This was achieved by building and deploying adaptive QoS-aware, distributed middleware applications. The work in [4] and [5] described a number of important aspects that obviously crosscut several modules in web applications. They included authentication, exception handling, logging, profiling, pooling and caching.…”