Starvation Freedom in Multi-Version Transactional Memory Systems

Chaudhary, Ved Prakash and Kulkarni, Sandeep and Kumari, Sweta and Peri, Sathya (2017) Starvation Freedom in Multi-Version Transactional Memory Systems. arXiv. pp. 1-45.

[img]
Preview
Text (arXiv copy)
1709.01033.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (592kB) | Preview

Abstract

Software Transactional Memory systems (STMs) have garnered significant interest as an elegant alternative for addressing synchronization and concurrency issues with multi-threaded programming in multi-core systems. In order for STMs to be efficient, they must guarantee some progress properties. This work explores the notion of starvation-freedom in Software Transactional Memory Systems (STMs). An STM system is said to be starvation-free if every thread invoking a transaction gets opportunity to take a step (due to the presence of a fair scheduler) then the transaction will eventually commit. A few starvation-free algorithms have been proposed in the literature in the context of single-version STM Systems. These algorithm work on the basis of priority. But the drawback with this approach is that if a set of high-priority transactions become slow then they can cause several other transactions to abort. Multi-version STMs maintain multiple-versions for each transactional object or t-object. By storing multiple versions, these systems can achieve greater concurrency. In this paper, we propose a multi-version starvation free STM, KSFTM, which as the name suggests achieves starvation freedom while storing K versions of each t-object. Here K is an input parameter fixed by the application programmer depending on the requirement. Our algorithm is dynamic which can support different values of K ranging from 1 to infinity . If K is infinity then there is no limit on the number of versions. But a separate garbage-collection mechanism is required to collect unwanted versions. On the other hand, when K is 1, it becomes same as a single-version STM system. We prove the correctness and starvation-freedom property of the proposed KSFTM algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-version STM system that is correct and satisfies starvation-freedom as well.

[error in script]
IITH Creators:
IITH CreatorsORCiD
Peri, SathyaUNSPECIFIED
Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Subjects: Computer science > Special computer methods
Divisions: Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Depositing User: Team Library
Date Deposited: 11 Sep 2017 04:32
Last Modified: 11 Sep 2017 04:32
URI: http://raiith.iith.ac.in/id/eprint/3530
Publisher URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01033
Related URLs:

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item
Statistics for RAIITH ePrint 3530 Statistics for this ePrint Item