The Future(s) of Transactional Memory

Abstract

This work investigates how to combine two powerful abstractions to manage concurrent programming: Transactional Memory (TM) and futures. The former hides from programmers the complexity of synchronizing concurrent access to shared data, via the familiar abstraction of atomic transactions. The latter serves to schedule and synchronize the parallel execution of computations whose results are not immediately required. While TM and futures are two widely investigated topics, the problem of how to exploit these two abstractions in synergy is still largely unexplored in the literature. This paper fills this gap by introducing Java Transactional Futures (JTF), a Java-based TM implementation that allows programmers to use futures to coordinate the execution of parallel tasks, while leveraging transactions to synchronize accesses to shared data. JTF provides a simple and intuitive semantic regarding the admissible serialization orders of the futures spawned by transactions, by ensuring that the results produced by a future are always consistent with those that one would obtain by executing the future sequentially. Our experimental results show that the use of futures in a TM allows not only to unlock parallelism within transactions, but also to reduce the cost of conflicts among top-level transactions in high contention workloads.