A Transactional Correctness Tool for Abstract Data Types

摘要

Transactional memory simplifies multiprocessor programming by providing the guarantee that a sequential block of code in the form of a transaction will exhibit atomicity and isolation. Transactional data structures offer the same guarantee to concurrent data structures by enabling the atomic execution of a composition of operations. The concurrency control of transactional memory systems preserves atomicity and isolation by detecting read/write conflicts among multiple concurrent transactions. State-of-the-art transactional data structures improve on this concurrency control protocol by providing explicit transaction-level synchronization for only non-commutative operations. Since read/write conflicts are handled by thread-level concurrency control, the correctness of transactional data structures cannot be evaluated according to the read/write histories. This presents a challenge for existing correctness verification techniques for transactional memory, because correctness is determined according to the transitions taken by the transactions in the presence of read/write conflicts.