Irrevocable transactions and their applications

ABSTRACT

Transactional memory (TM) provides a safer, more modular, and more scalable alternative to traditional lock-based synchronization. Implementing high performance TM systems has recently been an active area of research. However, current TM systems provide limited, if any, support for transactions executing irrevocable actions, such as I/O and system calls, whose side effects cannot in general be rolled back. This severely limits the ability of these systems to run commercial workloads.

This paper describes the design of a transactional memory system that allows irrevocable actions to be executed inside of transactions. While one transaction is executing an irrevocable action, other transactions can still execute and commit concurrently. We use a novel mechanism called single-owner read locks to implement irrevocable actions inside transactions that maximizes concurrency and avoids overhead when the mechanism is not used. We also show how irrevocable transactions can be leveraged for contention management to handle actions whose effects may be expensive to roll back. Finally, we present a thorough performance evaluation of the irrevocability mechanism for the different usage models.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.1 PROGRAMMING TECHNIQUES
      D.1.3 Concurrent Programming
          Subjects: Parallel programming

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Concurrent programming structures
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Run-time environments

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Languages, Performance

Keywords:
concurrent programming, performance, software transactional memory, virtual machines