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Grasping the Gap Between Blocking and Non-Blocking Transactional Memories

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Distributed Computing (DISC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9363))

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Abstract

Transactional memory (TM) is an inherently optimistic synchronization abstraction: it allows concurrent processes to execute sequences of shared-data accesses (transactions) speculatively, with an option of aborting them in the future. Early TM designs avoided using locks and relied on non-blocking synchronization to ensure obstruction-freedom: a transaction that encounters no step contention is not allowed to abort. However, it was later observed that obstruction-free TMs perform poorly and, as a result, state-of-the-art TM implementations are nowadays blocking, allowing aborts because of data conflicts rather than step contention.

In this paper, we explain this shift in the TM practice theoretically, via complexity bounds. We prove a few important lower bounds on obstruction-free TMs. Then we present a lock-based TM implementation that beats all of these lower bounds. In sum, our results exhibit a considerable complexity gap between non-blocking and blocking TM implementations.

Petr Kuznetsov—The author is supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, ANR-14-CE35-0010-01, project DISCMAT

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Télécom ParisTech, Paris, France

    Petr Kuznetsov

  2. TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Srivatsan Ravi

Authors
  1. Petr Kuznetsov
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  2. Srivatsan Ravi
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Correspondence to Srivatsan Ravi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technion, Haifa, Israel

    Yoram Moses

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Kuznetsov, P., Ravi, S. (2015). Grasping the Gap Between Blocking and Non-Blocking Transactional Memories. In: Moses, Y. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9363. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48653-5_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48653-5_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-48652-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-48653-5

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