Achieving Starvation-Freedom with Greater Concurrency in Multi-Version Object-based Transactional Memory Systems

Abstract: To utilize the multi-core processors properly concurrent programming is needed. Concurrency control is the main challenge while designing a correct and efficient concurrent program. Software Transactional Memory Systems (STMs) provides ease of multithreading to the programmer without worrying about concurrency issues such as deadlock, livelock, priority inversion, etc. Most of the STMs works on read-write operations known as RWSTMs. Some STMs work at high-level operations and ensure greater concurrency than RWSTMs. Such STMs are known as Object-Based STMs (OSTMs). The transactions of OSTMs can return commit or abort. Aborted OSTMs transactions retry. But in the current setting of OSTMs, transactions may starve. So, we proposed a Starvation-Free OSTM (SF-OSTM) which ensures starvation-freedom in object based STM systems while satisfying the correctness criteria as co-opacity. Databases, RWSTMs and OSTMs say that maintaining multiple versions corresponding to each key of transaction reduces the number of aborts and improves the throughput. So, to achieve greater concurrency, we proposed Starvation-Free Multi-Version OSTM (SF-MVOSTM) which ensures starvation-freedom while storing multiple versions corresponding to each key and satisfies the correctness criteria such as local opacity. To show the performance benefits, We implemented three variants of SF-MVOSTM (SF-MVOSTM, SF-MVOSTM-GC and SF-KOSTM) and compared it with state-of-the-art STMs.