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Validity contracts for software transactions

Software Transactional Memory is a promising approach to concurrent program- ming, freeing programmers from error-prone concurrency control decisions that are complicated and not composable. But few such systems address consistencies of transactional objects. In this thesis, I propose a contract-based transactional programming model toward more secure transactional sofwares. In this general model, a validity contract spec- ifies both requirements and effects for transactions. Validity contracts bring nu- merous benefits including reasoning about and verifying transactional programs, detecting and resolving transactional conflicts, automating object revalidation and easing program debugging. I introduce an ownership-based framework, namely AVID, derived from the gen- eral model, using object ownership as a mechanism for specifying and reasoning validity contracts. I have specified a formal type system and implemented a pro- totype type checker to support static checking. I also have built a transactional library framework AVID, based on existing Java DSTM2 framework, for express- ing transactions and validity contracts. Experimental results on a multi-core system show that contracts add little over- heads to the original STM. I find that contract-aware contention management yields significant speedups in some cases. The results have suggested compiler- directed optimisation for tunning contract-based transactional programs. My further work will investigate the applications of transaction contracts on various aspects of TM research such as hardware support and open-nesting.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/272560
Date January 2009
CreatorsNguyen, Quan Hoang, Computer Science & Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW
PublisherAwarded by:University of New South Wales. Computer Science & Engineering
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
RightsCopyright Nguyen Quan Hoang., http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright

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