Privatization-Safe Transactional Memories

Authors Artem Khyzha, Hagit Attiya, Alexey Gotsman



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Author Details

Artem Khyzha
  • Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Hagit Attiya
  • Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
Alexey Gotsman
  • IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

Cite As Get BibTex

Artem Khyzha, Hagit Attiya, and Alexey Gotsman. Privatization-Safe Transactional Memories. In 33rd International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2019). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 146, pp. 24:1-24:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2019) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2019.24

Abstract

Transactional memory (TM) facilitates the development of concurrent applications by letting the programmer designate certain code blocks as atomic. Programmers using a TM often would like to access the same data both inside and outside transactions, and would prefer their programs to have a strongly atomic semantics, which allows transactions to be viewed as executing atomically with respect to non-transactional accesses. Since guaranteeing such semantics for arbitrary programs is prohibitively expensive, researchers have suggested guaranteeing it only for certain data-race free (DRF) programs, particularly those that follow the privatization idiom: from some point on, threads agree that a given object can be accessed non-transactionally.
In this paper we show that a variant of Transactional DRF (TDRF) by Dalessandro et al. is appropriate for a class of privatization-safe TMs, which allow using privatization idioms. We prove that, if such a TM satisfies a condition we call privatization-safe opacity and a program using the TM is TDRF under strongly atomic semantics, then the program indeed has such semantics. We also present a method for proving privatization-safe opacity that reduces proving this generalization to proving the usual opacity, and apply the method to a TM based on two-phase locking and a privatization-safe version of TL2. Finally, we establish the inherent cost of privatization-safety: we prove that a TM cannot be progressive and have invisible reads if it guarantees strongly atomic semantics for TDRF programs.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Concurrency
  • Theory of computation → Program semantics
  • Software and its engineering → Software verification
Keywords
  • Transactional memory
  • privatization
  • observational refinement

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