Abstract

The promise of software transactional memory (STM) is to combine an easy-to-use programming interface with an efficient utilization of the concurrent-computing abilities provided by modern machines. But does this combination come with an inherent cost?
We evaluate the cost of concurrency by measuring the amount of expensive synchronization that must be employed in an STM implementation that ensures positive concurrency, i.e., allows for concurrent transaction processing in some executions. We focus on two popular progress conditions that provide positive concurrency: progressiveness and permissiveness.
We show that in permissive STMs, providing a very high degree of concurrency, a transaction may perform a linear number of expensive synchronization patterns with respect to its read-set size. In contrast, progressive STMs provide a very small degree of concurrency but, as we …

Date

2011

Authors

Petr Kuznetsov, Srivatsan Ravi

Book

International Conference On Principles Of Distributed Systems

Pages

112-127

Publisher

Springer Berlin Heidelberg