Turning nondeterminism into parallelism

Omer Tripp, Eric Koskinen, Mooly Sagiv

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

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Nondeterminism is a useful and prevalent concept in the design and implementation of software systems. An important property of nondeterminism is its latent parallelism: A nondeterministic action can evaluate to multiple behaviors. If at least one of these behaviors does not conflict with concurrent tasks, then there is an admissible execution of the action in parallel with these tasks. Unfortunately, existing implementations of the atomic paradigm-optimistic as well as pessimistic-are unable to fully exhaust the parallelism potential of nondeterministic actions, lacking the means to guide concurrent tasks toward nondeterministic choices that minimize interference. This paper investigates the problem of utilizing parallelism due to nondeterminism. We observe that nondeterminism occurs in many real-world codes. We motivate the need for devising coordination mechanisms that can utilize available nondeterminism. We have developed a system featuring such mechanisms, which leverages nondeterminism in a wide class of query operations, allowing a task to look into the future of concurrent tasks that mutate the shared state during query evaluation and reduce conflict accordingly. We evaluate our system on a suite of 12 algorithmic benchmarks of wide applicability, as well as an industrial application. The results are encouraging.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSPLASH Indianapolis 2013
Subtitle of host publicationOOPSLA 2013 - Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications
Pages589-604
Number of pages16
DOIs
StatePublished - 2013
Event2013 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2013 - Indianapolis, IN, United States
Duration: 29 Oct 201331 Oct 2013

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA

Conference

Conference2013 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityIndianapolis, IN
Period29/10/1331/10/13

Keywords

  • Concurrency control
  • Nondeterminism
  • Parallelism
  • Serializability
  • Synchronization

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