Coarse-grained transactions

Eric Koskinen, Matthew Parkinson, Maurice Herlihy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

Traditional transactional memory systems suffer from overly conservative conflict detection, yielding so-called false conflicts, because they are based on fine-grained, low-level read/write conflicts. In response, the recent trend has been toward integrating various abstract data-type libraries using ad-hoc methods of high-level conflict detection. These proposals have led to improved performance but a lack of a unified theory has led to confusion in the literature. We clarify these recent proposals by defining a generalization of transactional memory in which a transaction consists of coarse-grained (abstract data-type) operations rather than simple memory read/write operations. We provide semantics for both pessimistic (e.g. transactional boosting) and optimistic (e.g. traditional TMs and recent alternatives) execution. We show that both are included in the standard atomic semantics, yet find that the choice imposes different requirements on the coarse-grained operations: pessimistic requires operations be left-movers, optimistic requires right-movers. Finally, we discuss how the semantics applies to numerous TM implementation details discussed widely in the literature.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPOPL'10 - Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages
Pages19-30
Number of pages12
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Event37th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL'10 - Madrid, Spain
Duration: 17 Jan 201023 Jan 2010

Publication series

NameConference Record of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages
ISSN (Print)0730-8566

Conference

Conference37th Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL'10
Country/TerritorySpain
CityMadrid
Period17/01/1023/01/10

Keywords

  • Abstract data-types
  • Coarse-grained transactions
  • Commutativity
  • Movers
  • Transactional boosting
  • Transactional memory

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