Runtime checking of serializability in software transactional memory

Abstract--Ensuring the correctness of complex implementations of software transactional memory (STM) is a daunting task. Attempts have been made to formally verify STMs, but these are limited in the scale of systems they can handle [1], [2], [3] and generally verify only a model of the system, and not the actual system. In this paper we present an alternate attack on checking the correctness of an STM implementation by verifying the execution runs of an STM using a checker that runs in parallel with the transaction memory system. With future many-core systems predicted to have hundreds and even thousands of cores [4], it is reasonable to utilize some of these cores for ensuring the correctness of the rest of the system. This will be needed anyway given the increasing likelihood of dynamic errors due to particle hits (soft errors) and increasing fragility of nanoscale devices. These errors can only be detected at runtime. An important correctness criterion that is the subject of verific...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Arnab Sinha, Sharad Malik
• Keywords: Checking, Correctness, Distributed And Parallel Computing, IPPS 2010, Software Transactional Memory