Abstract
We study the correctness of shared data structures under reads-write concurrency. A popular approach to ensuring correctness of read-only operations in the presence of concurrent update, is read-set validation, which checks that all read variables have not changed since they were first read. In practice, this approach is often too conservative, which adversely affects performance. In this paper, we introduce a new framework for reasoning about correctness of data structures under reads-write concurrency, which replaces validation of the entire read-set with more general criteria. Namely, instead of verifying that all read shared variables still hold the values read from them, we verify abstract conditions over the shared variables, which we call base conditions. We show that reading values that satisfy some base condition at every point in time implies correctness of read-only operations executing in parallel with updates. Somewhat surprisingly, the resulting correctness guarantee is not equivalent to linearizability, and is instead captured through two new conditions: validity and regularity. Roughly speaking, the former requires that a read-only operation never reaches a state unreachable in a sequential execution; the latter generalizes Lamport’s notion of regularity for arbitrary data structures, and is weaker than linearizability. We further extend our framework to capture also linearizability. We illustrate how our framework can be applied for reasoning about correctness of a variety of implementations of data structures such as linked lists.
This work was partially supported by the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Computational Intelligence (ICRI-CI), by the Israeli Ministry of Science, by a Royal Society International Exchanges Grant, and by the Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Fellowship in the Cyber Security Research Program.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Afek, Y., Matveev, A., Shavit, N.: Pessimistic software lock-elision. In: Aguilera, M.K. (ed.) DISC 2012. LNCS, vol. 7611, pp. 297–311. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Arbel, M., Attiya, H.: Concurrent updates with rcu: Search tree as an example. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2014, pp. 196–205. ACM, New York (2014)
Bayer, R., Schkolnick, M.: Concurrency of Operations on B-trees. In: Readings in Database Systems, pp. 129–139. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (1988)
Berenson, H., Bernstein, P., Gray, J., Melton, J., O’Neil, E., O’Neil, P.: A critique of ansi sql isolation levels. SIGMOD Rec. 24(2), 1–10 (1995)
Bernstein, P.A., Hadzilacos, V., Goodman, N.: Concurrency Control and Recovery in Database Systems. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston (1986)
Brown, T., Ellen, F., Ruppert, E.: Pragmatic primitives for non-blocking data structures. In: PODC, pp. 13–22 (2013)
Chockler, G., Lynch, N., Mitra, S., Tauber, J.: Proving atomicity: An assertional approach. In: Fraigniaud, P. (ed.) DISC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3724, pp. 152–168. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Courtois, P.J., Heymans, F., Parnas, D.L.: Concurrent control with “readers” and “writers”. Commun. ACM 14(10), 667–668 (1971)
Dice, D., Shalev, O., Shavit, N.: Transactional locking ii. In: Dolev, S. (ed.) DISC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4167, pp. 194–208. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Ernst, M.D., Cockrell, J., Griswold, W.G., Notkin, D.: Dynamically discovering likely program invariants to support program evolution. In: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 1999, pp. 213–224. ACM, New York (1999)
Guerraoui, R., Kapalka, M.: On the correctness of transactional memory. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPoPP 2008, pp. 175–184. ACM, New York (2008)
Hendler, D., Incze, I., Shavit, N., Tzafrir, M.: Flat combining and the synchronization-parallelism tradeoff. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 2010, pp. 355–364. ACM, New York (2010)
Herlihy, M., Moss, J.E.B.: Transactional memory: Architectural support for lock-free data structures. SIGARCH Comput. Archit. News 21(2), 289–300 (1993)
Herlihy, M.P., Wing, J.M.: Linearizability: A correctness condition for concurrent objects. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 12(3), 463–492 (1990)
Lamport, L.: How to make a multiprocessor computer that correctly executes multiprocess programs. IEEE Trans. Comput. 28(9), 690–691 (1979)
Lamport, L.: On interprocess communication. Part ii: Algorithms. Distributed Computing 1(2), 86–101 (1986)
Lev-Ari, K., Chockler, G., Keidar, I.: On correctness of data structures under reads-write concurrency. Tech. Rep. CCIT 866, EE, Technion (August 2014)
McKenney, P.E., Slingwine, J.D.: Read-copy update: Using execution history to solve concurrency problems. In: Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems (1998)
Moir, M., Shavit, N.: Concurrent data structures. In: Metha, D., Sahni, S. (eds.) Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, pp. 47-14–47-30. Chapman and Hall/CRC Press (2007)
Samadi, B.: B-trees in a system with multiple users. Inf. Process. Lett. 5(4), 107–112 (1976)
Scherer III, W.N., Scott, M.L.: Advanced contention management for dynamic software transactional memory. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2005, pp. 240–248. ACM, New York (2005)
Shao, C., Welch, J.L., Pierce, E., Lee, H.: Multiwriter consistency conditions for shared memory registers. SIAM J. Comput. 40(1), 28–62 (2011)
Shavit, N., Touitou, D.: Software transactional memory. In: Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 1995, pp. 204–213. ACM, New York (1995)
Vafeiadis, V., Herlihy, M., Hoare, T., Shapiro, M.: Proving correctness of highly-concurrent linearisable objects. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, PPoPP 2006, pp. 129–136. ACM, New York (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Lev-Ari, K., Chockler, G., Keidar, I. (2014). On Correctness of Data Structures under Reads-Write Concurrency. In: Kuhn, F. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8784. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45174-8_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45174-8_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-45173-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-45174-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)