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A transactional approach to lock scalability

Published: 14 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Most software transactional memory implementations execute code using fine-grained optimistic concurrency control. This does not perform well with low contention data structures where fine grained conflict detection means manipulating metadata for every object touched and optimistic concurrency control imposes the overhead of making thread private shadow copies. Also, a purely optimistic approach does not coexist naturally with legacy code that is either already concurrent using locks or does IO operations that cannot be revoked. We try to address these problems by presenting a new form of the reader writer locks used by the vast majority of concurrent code today. Along with the traditional lock/unlock operations, these new locks support STM-like management of shadow versions that can be used when desired by the programmer. We show how existing lock based code can be scaled to perform as well as an STM, with few changes to the existing code base. We also show as a corollary that our design allows construction of data structures that retain strict fairness between threads, while simultaneously allowing disjoint access parallelism.

References

[1]
O. Shalev D. Dice and N. Shavit. Transactional locking II. In DISC 2006.
[2]
K. Fraser. Practical lock freedom. PhD thesis, Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, 2003.
[3]
Paul E. McKenney and John D. Slingwine. Read-copy update: Using execution history to solve concurrency problems. In Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems, pages 509--518, October 1998.
[4]
J. Mellor-Crummey and M. Scott. Scalable reader-writer synchronization for shared-memory multiprocessors. In PPOPP 1991.
[5]
D. N. Jayasimha N. Dershowitz and S. Park. Bounded fairness. In Verification: Theory and Practice, 2003.

Cited By

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  • (2019)Sensor Fusion Used in Applications for Hand Rehabilitation: A Systematic ReviewIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2019.289708319:10(3581-3592)Online publication date: 15-May-2019

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cover image ACM Conferences
SPAA '08: Proceedings of the twentieth annual symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
June 2008
380 pages
ISBN:9781595939739
DOI:10.1145/1378533
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 June 2008

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Author Tags

  1. concurrency
  2. fairness
  3. locks
  4. transactional memory

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SPAA08

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Overall Acceptance Rate 447 of 1,461 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2019)Sensor Fusion Used in Applications for Hand Rehabilitation: A Systematic ReviewIEEE Sensors Journal10.1109/JSEN.2019.289708319:10(3581-3592)Online publication date: 15-May-2019

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