Brief announcement: transaction polymorphism

Vincent Gramoli, Rachid Guerraoui

Abstract: In this work, we present transaction polymorphism, a synchronization technique that consists of providing more control to the programmer than traditional (i.e., monomorphic) transactions to achieve comparable performance to generic lock-based and lock-free solutions. We prove the following results: (i) Lock-based synchronization enables strictly higher concurrency than monormophic transactions. (ii) Polymorphic transactions enable strictly higher concurrency than monomorphic transactions. The former result indicates that there exist some transactional programs that will never perform as well as their lock-based counterparts, whatever improvement could be made at the hardware level to diminish the overhead associated with transactional accesses. The latter result shows, however, that transaction polymorphism is a promising solution to cope with this issue.