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Achieving starvation-freedom in multi-version transactional memory systems

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Abstract

Software Transactional Memory systems (STMs) have garnered significant interest as an elegant alternative for addressing synchronization and concurrency issues with multi-threaded programming in multi-core systems. Client programs use STMs by issuing transactions. STM ensures that transaction either commits or aborts. A transaction aborted due to conflicts is typically re-issued with the expectation that it will complete successfully in a subsequent incarnation. However, many existing STMs fail to provide starvation freedom, i.e., in these systems, it is possible that concurrency conflicts may prevent an incarnated transaction from committing. To overcome this limitation, we systematically derive a novel starvation free algorithm for multi-version STM. Our algorithm can be used either with the case where the number of versions is unbounded and garbage collection is used or where only the latest K versions are maintained, KSFTM. We have demonstrated that our proposed algorithm performs better than existing state-of-the-art STMs.

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Notes

  1. Technically \(\infty \), which is assigned to \(tutl_i \), cannot be decremented. But here as mentioned earlier, we use \(\infty \) to denote the largest possible value that can be represented in a system.

  2. Code is available here: https://github.com/PDCRL/KSFTM.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the NSF XPS 1533802 and project funded by MeitY, GoI titled “An Efficient Distributed Framework for Smart Contract Execution in Blockchain Systems”, Approval No. 4(20)/2019-ITEA dated 27th February.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of CSE, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, India

    Ved Prakash Chaudhary, Chirag Juyal & Sathya Peri

  2. Department of Computer Science, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

    Sandeep Kulkarni

  3. Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel

    Sweta Kumari

Authors
  1. Ved Prakash Chaudhary
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  2. Chirag Juyal
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  3. Sandeep Kulkarni
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  4. Sweta Kumari
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  5. Sathya Peri
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Correspondence to Sweta Kumari.

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A preliminary version of this paper appeared in 8th International Conference On Networked Systems (NETYS 2019). A part of this work was submitted in IIT Hyderabad, India towards the fulfillment of Ph.D. thesis requirement by an author Sweta Kumari.

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Chaudhary, V.P., Juyal, C., Kulkarni, S. et al. Achieving starvation-freedom in multi-version transactional memory systems. Computing 104, 2159–2179 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-021-00994-y

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