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On avoiding spare aborts in transactional memory

Published: 11 August 2009 Publication History

Abstract

This paper takes a step toward developing a theory for understanding aborts in transactional memory systems (TMs). Existing TMs may abort many transactions that could, in fact, commit without violating correctness. We call such unnecessary aborts spare aborts. We classify what kinds of spare aborts can be eliminated, and which cannot. We further study what kinds of spare aborts can be avoided efficiently. Specifically, we show that some unnecessary aborts cannot be avoided, and that there is an inherent tradeoff between the overhead of a TM and the extent to which it reduces the number of spare aborts. We also present an efficient example TM algorithm that avoids certain kinds of spare aborts, and analyze its properties and performance.

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Cited By

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  • (2018)Boosting Transactional Memory with Stricter SerializabilityCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-319-92408-3_11(231-251)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
  • (2017)Transactions in relaxed memory architecturesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31581062:POPL(1-29)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2017
  • (2017)Concurrency for the Masses: The Paradigm of Software Transactional Memory2017 19th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC)10.1109/SYNASC.2017.00012(17-22)Online publication date: Sep-2017
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cover image ACM Conferences
SPAA '09: Proceedings of the twenty-first annual symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
August 2009
370 pages
ISBN:9781605586069
DOI:10.1145/1583991
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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Published: 11 August 2009

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  1. transactional memory

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

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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Boosting Transactional Memory with Stricter SerializabilityCoordination Models and Languages10.1007/978-3-319-92408-3_11(231-251)Online publication date: 27-May-2018
  • (2017)Transactions in relaxed memory architecturesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/31581062:POPL(1-29)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2017
  • (2017)Concurrency for the Masses: The Paradigm of Software Transactional Memory2017 19th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing (SYNASC)10.1109/SYNASC.2017.00012(17-22)Online publication date: Sep-2017
  • (2017)Partial Rollback-based Scheduling on In-memory Transactional Data GridsBig Data Research10.1016/j.bdr.2017.06.0049:C(47-56)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2017
  • (2016)Designing Password Policies for Strength and UsabilityACM Transactions on Information and System Security10.1145/289141118:4(1-34)Online publication date: 6-May-2016
  • (2016)WFR-TMJournal of Parallel and Distributed Computing10.1016/j.jpdc.2016.05.00296:C(134-151)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
  • (2016)Opacity vs TMS2: Expectations and RealityDistributed Computing10.1007/978-3-662-53426-7_20(269-283)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2016
  • (2015)Time-WarpACM Transactions on Parallel Computing10.1145/27754352:2(1-44)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2015
  • (2015)Reducing Aborts in Distributed Transactional Systems through Dependency DetectionProceedings of the 16th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking10.1145/2684464.2684475(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2015
  • (2015)Multi-versioning in Transactional MemoryTransactional Memory. Foundations, Algorithms, Tools, and Applications10.1007/978-3-319-14720-8_7(150-165)Online publication date: 2015
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