On open nesting in distributed transactional memory
Alexandru Turcu, Binoy Ravindran · 2012
Distributed Transactional Memory (DTM) is a recent but promising model for programming distributed systems. It aims to present programmers with a simple to use distributed concurrency control abstraction (transactions), while maintaining performance and scalability similar to distributed fine-grained locks. Any complications usually associated with such locks (e.g., distributed deadlocks) are avoided. Building upon the previously proposed Transactional Forwarding Algorithm (TFA), we add support for open-nested transactions. We discuss the mechanisms and performance implications of such nesting, and identify the cases where using open nesting is warranted and the relevant parameters for such a decision. To the best of our knowledge, our work contributes the first ever implementation of a DTM system with support for open-nested transactions.