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The Cost of Privatization

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Book cover Distributed Computing (DISC 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6343))

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Abstract

Software transactional memory (STM) guarantees that a transaction, consisting of a sequence of operations on the memory, appears to be executed atomically. In practice, it is important to be able to run transactions together with nontransactional legacy code accessing the same memory locations, by supporting privatization. Privatization should be provided without sacrificing the parallelism offered by today’s multicore systems and multiprocessors.

This paper proves an inherent cost for supporting privatization, which is linear in the number of privatized items. Specifically, we show that a transaction privatizing k items must have a data set of size at least k, in an STM with invisible reads, which is oblivious to different non-conflicting executions and guarantees progress in such executions. When reads are visible, it is shown that Ω(k) memory locations must be accessed by a privatizing transaction, where k is the minimum between the number of privatized items and the number of concurrent transactions guaranteed to make progresss, thus capturing the tradeoff between the cost of privatization and the parallelism offered by the STM.

This research is supported in part by the Israel Science Foundation (grant number 953/06). The full version of this paper  contains additional results, proofs and illustrations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Technion,  

    Hagit Attiya & Eshcar Hillel

  2. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL),  

    Hagit Attiya

Authors
  1. Hagit Attiya
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  2. Eshcar Hillel
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 02139-4307, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Nancy A. Lynch

  2. Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, 371 Fairfield Way, Unit 2155, 06269, Storrs, CT, USA

    Alexander A. Shvartsman

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Attiya, H., Hillel, E. (2010). The Cost of Privatization. In: Lynch, N.A., Shvartsman, A.A. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6343. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15763-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15763-9_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15762-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15763-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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