Autolocker: synchronization inference for atomic sections

The movement to multi-core processors increases the need for simpler, more robust parallel programming models. Atomic sections have been widely recognized for their ease of use. They are simpler and safer to use than manual locking and they increase modularity. But existing proposals have several practical problems, including high overhead and poor interaction with I/O. We present pessimistic atomic sections, a fresh approach that retains many of the advantages of optimistic atomic sections as seen in "transactional memory" without sacrificing performance or compatibility. Pessimistic atomic sections employ the locking mechanisms familiar to programmers while relieving them of most burdens of lock-based programming, including deadlocks. Significantly, pessimistic atomic sections separate correctness from performance: they allow programmers to extract more parallelism via finergrained locking without fear of introducing bugs. We believe this property is crucial for exploiting...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Bill McCloskey, Feng Zhou, David Gay, Eric A. Brewer
• Keywords: Pessimistic Atomic Sections, POPL 2006, Programming Languages, Standard Lock-based Code, Structures General Terms