Safe open-nested transactions through ownership

Researchers in transactional memory (TM) have proposed open nesting as a methodology for increasing the concurrency of transactional programs. The idea is to ignore "low-level" memory operations of an ted transaction when detecting conflicts for its parent transaction, and instead perform abstract concurrency control for the "high-level" operation that the nested transaction represents. To support this methodology, TM systems use an open-nested commit mechanism that commits all changes performed by an open-nested transaction directly to memory, thereby avoiding low-level conflicts. Unfortunately, because the TM runtime is unaware of the different levels of memory, unconstrained use of open-nested commits can lead to anomalous program behavior. We describe the framework of ownership-aware transactional memory which incorporates the notion of modules into the TM system and requires that transactions and data be associated with specific transactional modules or Xmodul...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Kunal Agrawal, I.-Ting Angelina Lee, Jim Sukha
• Keywords: Ownership-aware Commit Mechanism, Ownership-aware Tm, Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2009, Transactional Memory