US Patent 7921220 Reducing occurrences of two-phase commits in a multi-node computing system

Techniques are disclosed for reducing the number of two-phase commits required to perform atomic transactions in a multi-node system. By monitoring atomic operations that require two-phase commit protocols, a system may identify when it would be beneficial to consolidate data onto single (or at least fewer) compute node(s). In doing so, a less compute intensive commit protocol, such as a one-phase commit protocol may be used. Moreover, in situations where data consolidation is not available, the data may be migrated to compute nodes having a closer proximity. Thus, in such cases, network response times for two-phase commits required for an atomic operation may be reduced, thereby increasing the performance of a multi-node system.