Brief Announcement: Transaction Polymorphism

摘要

In this work, we present transaction polymorphism, a synchronization technique that provides more control to the programmer than traditional (i.e., monomorphic) transactions to achieve comparable performance to generic lock-based and lock-free solutions. We prove the following results: (i) Lock-based synchronization enables strictly higher concurrency than monor-mophic transactions, (ii) Polymorphic transactions enable strictly higher concurrency than monomorphic transactions. The former result indicates that there exist some transac-tional programs that will never perform as well as their lock-based counterparts, whatever improvement could be made at the hardware level to diminish the overhead associated with transactional accesses. The latter result shows, however, that transaction polymorphism is a promising solution to cope with this issue.