Skip to main content

Liveness of Communicating Transactions (Extended Abstract)

  • Conference paper
Book cover Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6461))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

We study liveness and safety in the context of CCS extended with communicating transactions, a construct we recently proposed to model automatic error recovery in distributed systems. We show that fair-testing and may-testing capture the right notions of liveness and safety in this setting, and argue that must-testing imposes too strong a requirement in the presence of transactions. We develop a sound and complete theory of fair-testing in terms of CCS-like tree failures and show that, compared to CCS, communicating transactions provide increased distinguishing power to the observer. We also show that weak bisimilarity is a sound, though incomplete, proof technique for both may- and fair-testing. To the best of our knowledge this is the first semantic treatment of liveness in the presence of transactions. We exhibit the usefulness of our theory by proving illuminating liveness laws and simple but non-trivial examples.

This research was supported by SFI project SFI 06 IN.1 1898.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Acciai, L., Boreale, M., Zilio, S.D.: A concurrent calculus with atomic transactions. In: De Nicola, R. (ed.) ESOP 2007. LNCS, vol. 4421, pp. 48–63. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Black, A.P., Cremet, V., Guerraoui, R., Odersky, M.: An equational theory for transactions. In: Pandya, P.K., Radhakrishnan, J. (eds.) FSTTCS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2914, pp. 38–49. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  3. Bocchi, L.: Compositional nested long running transactions. In: Wermelinger, M., Margaria-Steffen, T. (eds.) FASE 2004. LNCS, vol. 2984, pp. 194–208. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  4. Bruni, R., Laneve, C., Montanari, U.: Orchestrating transactions in join calculus*. In: Brim, L., Jančar, P., Křetínský, M., Kucera, A. (eds.) CONCUR 2002. LNCS, vol. 2421, pp. 321–544. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Bruni, R., Melgratti, H., Montanari, U.: Theoretical foundations for compensations in flow composition languages. In: POPL, pp. 209–220. ACM, New York (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bruni, R., Melgratti, H., Montanari, U.: Nested commits for mobile calculi: extending Join. In: IFIP-TCS, pp. 569–582. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Buscemi, M.G., Melgratti, H.: Transactional service level agreement. In: Kaklamanis, C., Nielson, F. (eds.) TGC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5474, pp. 124–139. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Cacciagrano, D., Corradini, F., Palamidessi, C.: Explicit fairness in testing semantics. Logical Methods in Computer Science 5(2) (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Caires, L., Ferreira, C., Vieira, H.T.: A process calculus analysis of compensations. In: Kaklamanis, C., Nielson, F. (eds.) TGC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5474, pp. 87–103. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  10. Danos, V., Krivine, J.: Transactions in RCCS. In: Abadi, M., de Alfaro, L. (eds.) CONCUR 2005. LNCS, vol. 3653, pp. 398–412. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. De Nicola, R., Hennessy, M.C.B.: Testing equivalences for processes. Theoretical Computer Science 34(1-2), 83–133 (1984)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  12. Elmas, T., Qadeer, S., Tasiran, S.: A calculus of atomic actions. In: POPL, pp. 2–15 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Field, J., Varela, C.A.: Transactors: a programming model for maintaining globally consistent distributed state in unreliable environments. In: POPL, pp. 195–208 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  14. van Glabbeek, R.: The linear time–branching time spectrum after 20 years. Celebration of 20 years of CONCUR (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Gorrieri, R., Marchetti, S., Montanari, U.: A2CCS: atomic actions for CCS. Theor. Comp. Sci. 72(2-3), 203–223 (1990)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  16. Guerraoui, R., Kapalka, M.: How Live Can a Transactional Memory Be? Tech. rep., EPFL (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Harris, T., Marlow, S., Peyton-Jones, S., Herlihy, M.: Composable memory transactions. In: PPoPP, pp. 48–60. ACM, New York (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Lamport, L.: Proving the correctness of multiprocess programs. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 3(2), 125–143 (1977)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Owicki, S., Lamport, L.: Proving liveness properties of concurrent programs. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 4(3), 455–495 (1982)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  20. Pedone, F., Guerraoui, R.: On transaction liveness in replicated databases. In: PRFTS, p. 104 (1997)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Rensink, A., Vogler, W.: Fair testing. Inf. and Comp. 205(2), 125–198 (2007)

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  22. de Vries, E., Koutavas, V., Hennessy, M.: Communicating Transactions. In: CONCUR 2010 (to appear, 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  23. de Vries, E., Koutavas, V., Hennessy, M.: Communicating transactions—technical appendix (April 2010), http://www.scss.tcd.ie/Edsko.de.Vries

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

de Vries, E., Koutavas, V., Hennessy, M. (2010). Liveness of Communicating Transactions (Extended Abstract). In: Ueda, K. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6461. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17164-2_27

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17164-2_27

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17163-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17164-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics