Elastic transactions

Pascal Felber, Vincent Gramoli, Rachid Guerraoui
2017 Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing  
This paper presents elastic transactions, an appealing alternative to traditional transactions, in particular to implement search structures in shared memory multicore architectures. Upon conflict detection, an elastic transaction might drop what it did so far within a separate transaction that immediately commits, and resume its computation within a new transaction which might itself be elastic. We present the elastic transaction model and an implementation of it, then we illustrate its
more » ... ity and performance on various concurrent data structures, namely double-ended queue, hash table, linked list, and skip list. Elastic transactions outperform classical ones on various workloads, with an improvement of 35% on average. They also exhibit competitive performance compared to lock-based techniques and are much simpler to program with than lock-free alternatives. $ A preliminary extended abstract of this work has been published in the proceedings of DISC 2009 [15], the current version extends it by generalizing the model, applying it to additional data structures, and comparing it against existing synchronization alternatives.
doi:10.1016/j.jpdc.2016.10.010 fatcat:tanoigl42jhyhdhjutdkcy75fy