Towards a fully-articulated pessimistic distributed transactional memory

Abstract

Transactional memory, an approach aiming to replace cumbersome locking mechanisms in concurrent systems, has become a popular research topic. But due to problems posed by irrevocable operations (e.g., system calls), the viability of pessimistic concurrency control for transactional memory systems is being explored, in lieu of the more typical optimistic approach. However, in a distributed setting, where partial transaction failures may happen, the inability of pessimistic transactional memories to roll back is a major shortcoming. Therefore, this paper presents a novel transactional memory concurrency control algorithm that is both fully pessimistic and rollback-capable.