Model specification

Copyright © 2011 Gabriel Zs. K. Horvath

This is my first attempt at giving a more formal definition of my software transactions model. Undoubtedly, a post which will be frequently updated.

Consider a system composed of the following:

• A single transaction manager holding a unique global version number
• Transactions
• Threads
• Semi-mutable versioned variables managed by the transaction manager
• Non-versioned transaction-local immutable variables
• External resources, these can be either read from or written to
• A garbage collector

The program consists in the execution of transactions in one or more concurrent threads.

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Joining transactions

Copyright 2011 © Gabriel Zs. K. Horvath

Up to now all the transactions have been running in independent threads. There hasn’t been any mention of sub-transactions or the possibility of joining threads.

Sub-transactions

Since all variables within a transaction are immutable, it is meaningless to think in terms of sub-transactions which commit changes. Instead we can have multiple threads running concurrently within a single transaction and merge the recorded write operations of the various threads when joing the threads. Since the threads within the same transaction must still register all the reads and writes independently of the main transaction they are equivalent to normal transactions which happen to share the same version number as the main transaction. So far my model has no concept of sub transactions.

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Garbage collection

Copyright 2010-2011 © Gabriel Zs. K. Horvath

So far all the versions of the versioned variables have been kept in the variables’ history. This is obviously not a viable option and an unnecessary one as most of the versions are likely to become quickly unreachable. Let me first define what a reachable version is. Consider the following versioned variables:

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Contiguous transactions and notifications

Copyright 2009-2011 © Gabriel Zs. K. Horvath

Contiguous transactions

Up to now atomicity has consisted in ensuring that writes to a number of versioned variables were “performed instantly”. The idea is that there is no observable gap between when the variables involved in the transaction are modified. So we have no gap between writes, but what about gaps between transactions? After a transaction has committed one might need to start a new transaction in the state the previous transaction left it in. One could start a new transaction straightaway, hoping to catch the system in the state the previous transaction left it in. But of course there always a risk that another transaction commits in the meantime and modifies the state of the system before our follow-on transaction starts. A contiguous transaction is one which is guaranteed to see the system in the state its parent transaction put it in.

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Composition and silent reads

Copyright 2010-2011 © Gabriel Zs. K. Horvath

So far all the read operations performed in the atomic block were being recorded, so as to be re-executed at commit time. We will see in this post that there are circumstances where one does not want the reads to be recorded. I will call these silent reads.

Composition

One of the most important and powerful concept in software engineering is the one of composition. We want to be able to compose existing data structures together to build new ones. Or we want to add new methods to existing ones without having to perform open heart surgery on that component. So let’s look at the concrete example of trying to implement the Last method on top of the set data structure:

public IEnumerable<T> Last(this IEnumerable<T> that) {
    var enumerator = that.GetEnumerator()
    if (enumerator.MoveNext()) {
        T t = enumerator.Current;
        while (enumerator.MoveNext()) {
            t = enumerator.Current;
        }
        yield t;
    }
}

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Eliminating spurious conflicts

Copyright 2009-2011 © Gabriel Zs. K. Horvath

In my previous post I introduced software transactions with semi-mutable versioned variables. I also gave an example which created spurious conflicts in concurrent transactions. As promised I will demonstrate in this post how these conflicts can be eliminated.

Semantics

Let’s go back to the concurrent debit/credit example of our previous post:

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Software transactions with semi-mutable versioned variables

Copyright 2009-2011 © Gabriel Zs. K. Horvath

In this post I will introduce software transactions with semi-mutable versioned variables.

Introduction

Transactions have been around for a long time. They are typically associated with databases, but also commonly used in other areas such as source control systems and installers. Database transactions are the inspiration of memory transactions, either with hardware support or as software transactional memory. Every transactional system has its own variation; however they all share the fundamental concept of atomicity and provide some level of isolation. Transactions allow the concurrent execution of multiple execution threads while preserving the illusion of serial execution within each thread and preserving consistency.

Transactional systems tend to suffer from spurious conflicts which unnecessary fail transactions. These spurious conflicts are conflicts which have no valid semantic or logical origin. We will see how software transactions can help reduce or sometimes entirely remove these spurious conflicts.

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