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OPODIS
2008

Ordering-Based Semantics for Software Transactional Memory

13 years 5 months ago
Ordering-Based Semantics for Software Transactional Memory
It has been widely suggested that memory transactions should behave as if they acquired and released a single global lock. Unfortunately, this behavior can be expensive to achieve, particularly when-as in the natural publication/privatization idiom--the same data are accessed both transactionally and nontransactionally. To avoid overhead, we propose selective strict serializability (SSS) semantics, in which transactions have a global total order, but nontransactional accesses are globally ordered only with respect to explicitly marked transactions. Our definition of SSS formally characterizes the permissible behaviors of an STM system without recourse to locks. If all transactions are marked, then SSS, singlelock semantics, and database-style strict serializability are equivalent. We evaluate several SSS implementations in the context of a TL2-like STM system. We also evaluate a weaker model, selective flow serializability (SFS), which is similar in motivation to the asymmetric lock a...
Michael F. Spear, Luke Dalessandro, Virendra J. Ma
Added 30 Oct 2010
Updated 30 Oct 2010
Type Conference
Year 2008
Where OPODIS
Authors Michael F. Spear, Luke Dalessandro, Virendra J. Marathe, Michael L. Scott
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