Reusable Concurrent Data Types

Abstract

Abstract. This paper contributes to address the fundamental challenge of building Concurrent Data Types (CDT) that are reusable and scalable at the same time. We do so by proposing the abstraction of Polymorphic Transactions (PT): a new programming abstraction that offers different compatible transactions that can run concurrently in the same application.We outline the commonality of the problem in various object-oriented languages and implement PT and a reusable package in Java. With PT, annotating sequential ADTs guarantee novice programmers to obtain an atomic and deadlock-free CDT and let an advanced programmer leverage the application semantics to get higher performance.We compare our polymorphic synchronization against transaction-based, lockbased and lock-free synchronizations on SPARC and x86-64 architectures and we integrate our methodology to a travel reservation benchmark. Although our reusable CDTs are sometimes less efficient than non-composable handcrafted CDTs from the JDK, they outperform all reusable Java CDTs.

Composing concurrency control

“…The work in [12,14] is also motivated by the same abstract problem of composing transactions that use different protocols. Our work focuses on abstract properties that enable such composition, while [12,14] address composition of a specific set of protocols.…”

“…Our work focuses on abstract properties that enable such composition, while [12,14] address composition of a specific set of protocols. [12] also addresses compiler support for automating composition, which we do not address.…”