Composing concurrency control

Concurrency control poses significant challenges when composing computations over multiple data-structures (objects) with different concurrency-control implementations. We formalize the usually desired requirements (serializability, abort-safety, deadlock-safety, and opacity) as well as stronger versions of these properties that enable composition. We show how to compose synchronization protocols in a way which preserves these properties. Our approach generalizes well-known synchronization protocols (such as two-phaselocking and two-phase-commit) and leads to new synchronization protocols. We apply this theory to show how we can safely compose optimistic and pessimistic concurrency control and demonstrate the practical value of such a composition. For example, we show how we can execute a transaction that accesses two objects, one controlled by an STM and another by locking.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Ofri Ziv, Alex Aiken, Guy Golan-Gueta, G. Ramalingam, Mooly Sagiv
• Keywords: PLDI 2015, Programming Languages