4,419 research outputs found
Maintaining the correctness of transactional memory programs
Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em
Engenharia InformáticaThis dissertation addresses the challenge of maintaining the correctness of transactional memory programs, while improving its parallelism with small transactions and relaxed isolation levels.
The efficiency of the transactional memory systems depends directly on the level of parallelism, which in turn depends on the conflict rate. A high conflict rate between memory transactions can be addressed by reducing the scope of transactions, but this approach may turn the application prone to the occurrence of atomicity violations. Another way to address this issue is to ignore some of the conflicts by using a relaxed isolation level, such as snapshot isolation, at the cost of introducing write-skews serialization anomalies that break the consistency guarantees provided by a stronger consistency property, such as opacity.
In order to tackle the correctness issues raised by the atomicity violations and the write-skew anomalies, we propose two static analysis techniques: one based in a novel static analysis algorithm that works on a dependency graph of program variables and detects atomicity violations;
and a second one based in a shape analysis technique supported by separation logic augmented with heap path expressions, a novel representation based on sequences of heap dereferences that certifies if a transactional memory program executing under snapshot isolation is free from writeskew
anomalies.
The evaluation of the runtime execution of a transactional memory algorithm using snapshot
isolation requires a framework that allows an efficient implementation of a multi-version algorithm and, at the same time, enables its comparison with other existing transactional memory algorithms. In the Java programming language there was no framework satisfying both these requirements. Hence, we extended an existing software transactional memory framework that already supported efficient implementations of some transactional memory algorithms, to also
support the efficient implementation of multi-version algorithms. The key insight for this extension is the support for storing the transactional metadata adjacent to memory locations. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by analyzing its impact with both single- and multi-version transactional memory algorithms using several transactional workloads.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - PhD research grant SFRH/BD/41765/2007, and in
the research projects Synergy-VM (PTDC/EIA-EIA/113613/2009), and RepComp (PTDC/EIAEIA/
108963/2008
Correctness and Progress Verification of Non-Blocking Programs
The progression of multi-core processors has inspired the development of concurrency libraries that guarantee safety and liveness properties of multiprocessor applications. The difficulty of reasoning about safety and liveness properties in a concurrent environment has led to the development of tools to verify that a concurrent data structure meets a correctness condition or progress guarantee. However, these tools possess shortcomings regarding the ability to verify a composition of data structure operations. Additionally, verification techniques for transactional memory evaluate correctness based on low-level read/write histories, which is not applicable to transactional data structures that use a high-level semantic conflict detection. In my dissertation, I present tools for checking the correctness of multiprocessor programs that overcome the limitations of previous correctness verification techniques. Correctness Condition Specification (CCSpec) is the first tool that automatically checks the correctness of a composition of concurrent multi-container operations performed in a non-atomic manner. Transactional Correctness tool for Abstract Data Types (TxC-ADT) is the first tool that can check the correctness of transactional data structures. TxC-ADT elevates the standard definitions of transactional correctness to be in terms of an abstract data type, an essential aspect for checking correctness of transactions that synchronize only for high-level semantic conflicts. Many practical concurrent data structures, transactional data structures, and algorithms to facilitate non-blocking programming all incorporate helping schemes to ensure that an operation comprising multiple atomic steps is completed according to the progress guarantee. The helping scheme introduces additional interference by the active threads in the system to achieve the designed progress guarantee. Previous progress verification techniques do not accommodate loops whose termination is dependent on complex behaviors of the interfering threads, making these approaches unsuitable. My dissertation presents the first progress verification technique for non-blocking algorithms that are dependent on descriptor-based helping mechanisms
Defining and Verifying Durable Opacity: Correctness for Persistent Software Transactional Memory
Non-volatile memory (NVM), aka persistent memory, is a new paradigm for
memory that preserves its contents even after power loss. The expected ubiquity
of NVM has stimulated interest in the design of novel concepts ensuring
correctness of concurrent programming abstractions in the face of persistency.
So far, this has lead to the design of a number of persistent concurrent data
structures, built to satisfy an associated notion of correctness: durable
linearizability.
In this paper, we transfer the principle of durable concurrent correctness to
the area of software transactional memory (STM). Software transactional memory
algorithms allow for concurrent access to shared state. Like linearizability
for concurrent data structures, opacity is the established notion of
correctness for STMs. First, we provide a novel definition of durable opacity
extending opacity to handle crashes and recovery in the context of NVM. Second,
we develop a durably opaque version of an existing STM algorithm, namely the
Transactional Mutex Lock (TML). Third, we design a proof technique for durable
opacity based on refinement between TML and an operational characterisation of
durable opacity by adapting the TMS2 specification. Finally, we apply this
proof technique to show that the durable version of TML is indeed durably
opaque. The correctness proof is mechanized within Isabelle.Comment: This is the full version of the paper that is to appear in FORTE 2020
(https://www.discotec.org/2020/forte
A Template for Implementing Fast Lock-free Trees Using HTM
Algorithms that use hardware transactional memory (HTM) must provide a
software-only fallback path to guarantee progress. The design of the fallback
path can have a profound impact on performance. If the fallback path is allowed
to run concurrently with hardware transactions, then hardware transactions must
be instrumented, adding significant overhead. Otherwise, hardware transactions
must wait for any processes on the fallback path, causing concurrency
bottlenecks, or move to the fallback path. We introduce an approach that
combines the best of both worlds. The key idea is to use three execution paths:
an HTM fast path, an HTM middle path, and a software fallback path, such that
the middle path can run concurrently with each of the other two. The fast path
and fallback path do not run concurrently, so the fast path incurs no
instrumentation overhead. Furthermore, fast path transactions can move to the
middle path instead of waiting or moving to the software path. We demonstrate
our approach by producing an accelerated version of the tree update template of
Brown et al., which can be used to implement fast lock-free data structures
based on down-trees. We used the accelerated template to implement two
lock-free trees: a binary search tree (BST), and an (a,b)-tree (a
generalization of a B-tree). Experiments show that, with 72 concurrent
processes, our accelerated (a,b)-tree performs between 4.0x and 4.2x as many
operations per second as an implementation obtained using the original tree
update template
Achieving Starvation-Freedom with Greater Concurrency in Multi-Version Object-based Transactional Memory Systems
To utilize the multi-core processors properly concurrent programming is
needed. Concurrency control is the main challenge while designing a correct and
efficient concurrent program. Software Transactional Memory Systems (STMs)
provides ease of multithreading to the programmer without worrying about
concurrency issues such as deadlock, livelock, priority inversion, etc. Most of
the STMs works on read-write operations known as RWSTMs. Some STMs work at
high-level operations and ensure greater concurrency than RWSTMs. Such STMs are
known as Object-Based STMs (OSTMs). The transactions of OSTMs can return commit
or abort. Aborted OSTMs transactions retry. But in the current setting of
OSTMs, transactions may starve. So, we proposed a Starvation-Free OSTM
(SF-OSTM) which ensures starvation-freedom in object based STM systems while
satisfying the correctness criteria as co-opacity. Databases, RWSTMs and OSTMs
say that maintaining multiple versions corresponding to each key of transaction
reduces the number of aborts and improves the throughput. So, to achieve
greater concurrency, we proposed Starvation-Free Multi-Version OSTM (SF-MVOSTM)
which ensures starvation-freedom while storing multiple versions corresponding
to each key and satisfies the correctness criteria such as local opacity. To
show the performance benefits, We implemented three variants of SF-MVOSTM
(SF-MVOSTM, SF-MVOSTM-GC and SF-KOSTM) and compared it with state-of-the-art
STMs.Comment: 68 pages, 24 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1709.0103
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