Integrating file operations into transactional memory

Abstract

Researchers have proposed transactional memory as a concurrency primitive to simplify the development of multi-threaded programs. In this paper we present a new approach for supporting I/O operations in the context of transactional memory. Our approach provides isolation between the file operations of different transactions while allowing multiple transactions to concurrently perform I/O. To ease adoption, our approach attempts to implement the traditional I/O programming interface as closely as possible. We formalize aspects of our approach and use the formalization to reason about the correctness of the approach. We have implemented our approach as a Java library and have integrated it with the DSTM2 transactional memory system. We have evaluated the approach with several benchmarks including JCarder, TupleSoup, a financial transaction benchmark, a parallel sort benchmark, and a parallel grep benchmark. Our experience shows that the approach provides a straightforward mechanism for developers to integrate I/O in a transactional memory environment and that it performs well.