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Transactions on Mergeable Objects

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Programming Languages and Systems (APLAS 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9458))

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Abstract

Destructible updates on shared objects require careful handling of concurrent accesses in multi-threaded programs. Paradigms such as Transactional Memory support the programmer in correctly synchronizing access to mutable shared data by serializing the transactional reads and writes. But under high contention, serializable transactions incur frequent aborts and limit parallelism. This can lead to a severe performance degradation.

In this paper, we propose mergeable transactions which provide a consistency semantics that allows for more scalability even under contention. Instead of aborting and re-executing, object versions from conflicting updates on shared objects are merged using data-type specific semantics. The evaluation of our prototype implementation in Haskell shows that mergeable transactions outperform serializable transactions even under low contention while providing a structured and type-safe interface.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The name MVar for mergeable variables is already used in Haskell.

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Acknowledgments

This research is supported in part by the European FP7 project 609 551 SyncFree.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Deepthi Devaki Akkoorath & Annette Bieniusa

Authors
  1. Deepthi Devaki Akkoorath
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  2. Annette Bieniusa
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Correspondence to Deepthi Devaki Akkoorath .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China

    Xinyu Feng

  2. Pohang Univ. of Science and Technology, Nam-Gu, Pohang, Korea (Republic of)

    Sungwoo Park

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Akkoorath, D.D., Bieniusa, A. (2015). Transactions on Mergeable Objects. In: Feng, X., Park, S. (eds) Programming Languages and Systems. APLAS 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9458. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26529-2_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26529-2_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26528-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26529-2

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