Abstract
The Software Transactional Memory (STM) model is an original approach for controlling concurrent accesses to resources without the need for explicit lock-based synchronization mechanisms. A key feature of STM is to provide a way to group sequences of read and write actions inside atomic blocks, similar to database transactions, whose whole effect should occur atomically.
In this paper, we investigate STM from a process algebra perspective and define an extension of asynchronous CCS with atomic blocks of actions. We show that the addition of atomic transactions results in a very expressive calculus, enough to easily encode other concurrent primitives such as guarded choice and multiset-synchronization (à la join-calculus). The correctness of our encodings is proved using a suitable notion of bisimulation equivalence. The equivalence is then applied to prove interesting “laws of transactions” and to obtain a simple normal form for transactions.
Keywords
- Global State
- Block Action
- Reduction Rule
- Read Action
- Concurrent Access
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This work was partially supported by the French ANR ARASSIA project COPS and the EU FET-GC2 initiative, project SENSORIA.
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Acciai, L., Boreale, M., Dal Zilio, S. (2007). A Concurrent Calculus with Atomic Transactions. In: De Nicola, R. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. ESOP 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4421. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-71316-6_5
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