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Opacity vs TMS2: Expectations and Reality

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Distributed Computing (DISC 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9888))

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Abstract

Most of the popular Transactional Memory (TM) algorithms are known to be safe because they satisfy opacity, the well-known correctness criterion for TM algorithms. Recently, it has been shown that they are even more conservative, and that they satisfy TMS2, a strictly stronger property than opacity. This paper investigates the theoretical and practical implications of relaxing those algorithms in order to allow histories that are not TMS2. In particular, we present four impossibility results on TM implementations that are not TMS2 and are either opaque or strictly serializable, and one practical TM implementation that extends TL2, a high-performance state-of-the-art TM algorithm, to allow non-TMS2 histories. By matching our theoretical findings with the results of our performance evaluation, we conclude that designing and implementing TM algorithms that are not TMS2, but safe, has inherent costs that limit any possible performance gain.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under grant FA9550-14-1-0187.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA

    Sandeep Hans, Ahmed Hassan, Roberto Palmieri, Sebastiano Peluso & Binoy Ravindran

Authors
  1. Sandeep Hans
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  2. Ahmed Hassan
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  3. Roberto Palmieri
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  4. Sebastiano Peluso
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  5. Binoy Ravindran
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sandeep Hans .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. LABRI, Univ of Bordeaux LABRI, Talence Cedex, France

    Cyril Gavoille

  2. CNRS, Universite Bordeaux 1 CNRS, Talence Cedex, France

    David Ilcinkas

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Hans, S., Hassan, A., Palmieri, R., Peluso, S., Ravindran, B. (2016). Opacity vs TMS2: Expectations and Reality. In: Gavoille, C., Ilcinkas, D. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9888. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53426-7_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-53426-7_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-53425-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-53426-7

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