Polymorphic Contention Management

Abstract. In software transactional memory (STM) systems, a contention manager resolves conflicts among transactions accessing the same memory locations. Whereas atomicity and serializability of the transactions are guaranteed at all times, the contention manager is of crucial importance for guaranteeing that the system as a whole makes progress. A number of different contention management policies have been proposed and evaluated in the recent literature. An empirical evaluation of these policies leads to the striking result that there seems to be no “universal” contention manager that works best under all reasonable circumstances. Instead, transaction throughput can vary dramatically depending on factors such as transaction length, data access patterns, the length of contended vs. uncontended phases, and so on. This paper proposes polymorphic contention management, a structure that allows contention managers to vary not just across workloads, but across concurrent transactions ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: WDAG
• Authors: Rachid Guerraoui, Maurice Herlihy, Bastian Pochon
• Keywords: Algorithms, Contention Management, Contention Managers, Polymorphic Contention Management, WDAG 2005