Abstract

Transactional memory (TM) allows concurrent processes to organize sequences of operations on shared data items into atomic transactions. A transaction may commit, in which case it appears to have executed sequentially or it may abort, in which case no data item is updated.
The TM programming paradigm emerged as an alternative to conventional fine-grained locking techniques, offering ease of programming and compositionality. Though typically themselves implemented using locks, TMs hide the inherent issues of lock-based synchronization behind a nice transactional programming interface.
In this paper, we explore inherent time and space complexity of lock-based TMs, with a focus of the most popular class of progressive lock-based TMs. We derive that a progressive TM might enforce a read-only transaction to perform a quadratic (in the number of the data items it reads) number of …

Date

2015

Authors

Petr Kuznetsov, Srivatsan Ravi

Book

International Conference on Parallel Computing Technologies

Pages

410-425

Publisher

Springer International Publishing