Semantic Conflict Detection for Transactional Data Structure Libraries

The Transactional Data Structure Library (TDSL) methodology improves the programmability and performance of concurrent software by making it possible for programmers to compose multiple concurrent data structure operations into coarse-grained transactions. Like transactional memory, TDSL enables arbitrarily many operations on arbitrarily many data structures to appear to other threads as a single atomic, isolated transaction. Like concurrent data structures, the individual operations on a TDSL data structure are optimized to avoid artificial contention. We introduce techniques for reducing false conflicts in TDSL implementations. Our approach allows expressing the postconditions of operations entirely via semantic properties, instead of through low-level structural properties. Our design is general enough to support lists, deques, ordered and unordered maps, and vectors. It supports richer programming interfaces than are available in existing TDSL implementations. It is also capable of precise memory management, which is necessary in low-level languages like C++.