Abort-free STM: A non-blocking concurrency control approach using software transactional memory

Abstract

Software transactional memory (STM) is a promising approach for concurrency control in parallel computing environment. The non-blocking progress implementations for STM forces transactions to abort. Although this is primarily done to ensure block-freedom, it may lead to poor system performance. This paper proposes a new Abort-Free STM methodology (AFTM) to achieve abort-free execution so that a group of processes, which are contending for a common set of concurrent objects can commit in finite number of steps. The proposed STM allows wait-free, non-blocking execution of multiple read and write transactions on shared data object without aborting any of the transactions. The important properties of AFTM have been proved towards establishing its advantages.