Investigating the semantics of futures in transactional memory systems

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of integrating two powerful abstractions for concurrent programming, namely futures and transactional memory. Our focus is on specifying the semantics of execution of "transactional futures", i.e., futures that execute as atomic transactions and that are spawned/evaluated by other (plain) transactions or transactional futures. We show that, due to the ability of futures to generate parallel computations with complex dependencies, there exist several plausible (i.e., intuitive) alternatives for defining the isolation and atomicity semantics of transactional futures. The alternative semantics we propose explore different trade-offs between ease of use and efficiency. We have implemented the proposed semantics by introducing a graph-based software transactional memory algorithm, which we integrated with a state of the art JAVA-based Software Transactional Memory (STM). We quantify the performance trade-offs associated with the different semantics using an extensive experimental study encompassing a wide range of diverse workloads.