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A Lock-Based STM Protocol That Satisfies Opacity and Progressiveness

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Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5401))

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Abstract

The aim of a software transactional memory (STM) system is to facilitate the delicate problem of low-level concurrency management, i.e. the design of programs made up of processes/threads that concurrently access shared objects. To that end, a STM system allows a programmer to write transactions accessing shared objects, without having to take care of the fact that these objects are concurrently accessed: the programmer is discharged from the delicate problem of concurrency management. Given a transaction, the STM system commits or aborts it. Ideally, it has to be efficient (this is measured by the number of transactions committed per time unit), while ensuring that as few transactions as possible are aborted. From a safety point of view (the one addressed in this paper), a STM system has to ensure that, whatever its fate (commit or abort), each transaction always operates on a consistent state.

STM systems have recently received a lot of attention. Among the proposed solutions, lock-based systems and clock-based systems have been particularly investigated. Their design is mainly efficiency-oriented, the properties they satisfy are not always clearly stated, and few of them are formally proved. This paper presents a lock-based STM system designed from simple basic principles. Its main features are the following: it (1) uses visible reads, (2) does not require the shared memory to manage several versions of each object, (3) uses neither timestamps, nor version numbers, (4) satisfies the opacity safety property, (5) aborts a transaction only when it conflicts with some other live transaction (progressiveness property), (6) never aborts a write only transaction, (7) employs only bounded control variables, (8) has no centralized contention point, and (9) is formally proved correct.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRISA, Université de Rennes 1, 35042, Rennes, France

    Damien Imbs & Michel Raynal

Authors
  1. Damien Imbs
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  2. Michel Raynal
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Florida State University, 207A Love Building, PO Box 4530, FL 32306-4530, Tallahassee, USA

    Theodore P. Baker

  2. Université de Versailles-St-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 45, avenue des Etats-Unis, 78035, Versailles Cedex, France

    Alain Bui

  3. LIP6 & INRIA Grand Large, Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6, 104 avenue du Président Kennedy, 75016, Paris, France

    Sébastien Tixeuil

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Imbs, D., Raynal, M. (2008). A Lock-Based STM Protocol That Satisfies Opacity and Progressiveness. In: Baker, T.P., Bui, A., Tixeuil, S. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5401. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92221-6_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92221-6_16

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-92220-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-92221-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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