On Open Nesting in Distributed Transactional Memory: Technical Report
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.