Abstract
We introduce the notion of permissiveness in transactional memories (TM). Intuitively, a TM is permissive if it never aborts a transaction when it need not. More specifically, a TM is permissive with respect to a safety property p if the TM accepts every history that satisfies p. Permissiveness, like safety and liveness, can be used as a metric to compare TMs. We illustrate that it is impractical to achieve permissiveness deterministically, and then show how randomization can be used to achieve permissiveness efficiently. We introduce Adaptive Validation STM (AVSTM), which is probabilistically permissive with respect to opacity; that is, every opaque history is accepted by AVSTM with positive probability. Moreover, AVSTM guarantees lock freedom. Owing to its permissiveness, AVSTM outperforms other STMs by up to 40% in read dominated workloads in high contention scenarios. But, in low contention scenarios, the book-keeping done by AVSTM to achieve permissiveness makes AVSTM, on average, 20-30% worse than existing STMs.
This research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Dice, D., Shalev, O., Shavit, N.: Transactional locking ii. In: DISC, pp. 194–208. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Fraser, K.: Practical Lock Freedom. PhD thesis, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge (2003)
Fraser, K., Harris, T.: Concurrent programming without locks. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. (2007)
Guerraoui, R., Henzinger, T.A., Jobstmann, B., Singh, V.: Model checking transactional memories. In: PLDI, pp. 372–382. ACM Press, New York (2008)
Guerraoui, R., Henzinger, T.A., Singh, V.: Nondeterminism and completeness in transactional memories. In: CONCUR. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Guerraoui, R., Herlihy, M., Kapałka, M., Pochon, B.: Robust contention management in software transactional memory. In: SCOOL (October 2005)
Guerraoui, R., Kapałka, M.: On the correctness of transactional memory. In: PPoPP. ACM Press, New York (2008)
Harris, T., Fraser, K.: Language support for lightweight transactions. In: OOPSLA, pp. 388–402 (2003)
Herlihy, M., Luchangco, V., Moir, M., Scherer, W.N.: Software transactional memory for dynamic-sized data structures. In: PODC, pp. 92–101. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Papadimitriou, C.H.: The serializability of concurrent database updates. J. ACM, 631–653 (1979)
Riegel, T., Felber, P., Fetzer, C.: A lazy snapshot algorithm with eager validation. In: DISC, pp. 284–298. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Scherer, W.N., Scott, M.L.: Advanced contention management for dynamic software transactional memory. In: PODC, pp. 240–248. ACM Press, New York (2005)
Scott, M.L.: Sequential specification of transactional memory semantics. In: ACM SIGPLAN WTC (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Guerraoui, R., Henzinger, T.A., Singh, V. (2008). Permissiveness in Transactional Memories. In: Taubenfeld, G. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5218. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87779-0_21
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87779-0_21
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-87778-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-87779-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)