Transactions with isolation and cooperation

We present the TIC (Transactions with Isolation and Cooperation) model for concurrent programming. TIC adds to standard transactional memory the ability for a transaction to observe the effects of other threads at selected points. This allows transactions to cooperate, as well as to invoke nonrepeatable or irreversible operations, such as I/O. Cooperating transactions run the danger of exposing intermediate state and of having other threads change the transaction’s state. The TIC model protects against unanticipated interference by having the type system keep track of all operations that may (transitively) violate the atomicity of a transaction and require the programmer to establish consistency at appropriate points. The result is a programming model that is both general and simple. We have used the TIC model to re-engineer existing lock-based applications including a substantial multi-threaded web mail server and a memory allocator with coarse-grained locking. Our experience conï¬...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Yannis Smaragdakis, Anthony Kay, Reimer Behrends, Michal Young
• Keywords: OOPSLA 2007, TIC Model, TIC Model Protects, Transactional Memory