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A Single-Version STM that Is Multi-Versioned Permissive

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Abstract

We present PermiSTM, a single-version STM that satisfies a practical notion of permissiveness, usually associated with keeping many versions: it never aborts read-only transactions, and it aborts other transactions only due to a conflicting transaction (writing to a common data item), thereby avoiding spurious aborts. PermiSTM also avoids unnecessary contention on the memory, being disjoint-access parallel.

We first present a variant of PermiSTM that uses k-compare-single-swap primitive. Then we present a variant with similar properties using only cas, and show how the livelocks it may incur can be avoided with best-effort hardware transactions.

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Notes

  1. In the full model, read and write operations may also cause a transaction to forcibly abort; however, this does not happen in our algorithms.

  2. This is analogous to the notion of current version of a transactional object in DSTM [18].

  3. An alternative is to use dcas, but we wanted to explore how to use the recently proposed architectures supporting BEHTM [10, 24, 29].

  4. In [3, 27] disjoint-access parallel STMs are referred to as weakly disjoint-access parallel as opposed to strongly disjoint-access parallel implementations.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees for their comments, which helped to improve the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, Israel

    Hagit Attiya & Eshcar Hillel

  2. Yahoo! Labs, Haifa, Israel

    Eshcar Hillel

Authors
  1. Hagit Attiya
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  2. Eshcar Hillel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hagit Attiya.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in ICDCN 2011.

This research is supported in part by the Israel Science Foundation (grants 1344/06 and 1227/10), and by funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement number 238639, ITN project TRANSFORM.

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Attiya, H., Hillel, E. A Single-Version STM that Is Multi-Versioned Permissive. Theory Comput Syst 51, 425–446 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-012-9406-3

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