A competitive analysis for balanced transactional memory workloads

Gokarna Sharma, Costas Busch

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider transactional memory contention management in the context of balanced workloads, where if a transaction is writing, the number of write operations it performs is a constant fraction of its total reads and writes. We explore the theoretical performance boundaries of contention management in balanced workloads from the worst-case perspective by presenting and analyzing two new polynomial time contention management algorithms. The first algorithm Clairvoyant is O(√s)-competitive, where s is the number of shared resources. This algorithm depends on explicitly knowing the conflict graph. The second algorithm Non-Clairvoyant is O(√s·log n)-competitive, with high probability, which is only a O(log n) factor worse, but does not require knowledge of the conflict graph, where n is the number of transactions. Both of these algorithms are greedy. We also prove that the performance of Clairvoyant is tight, since there is no polynomial time contention management algorithm that is better than O((√s)1-ε)-competitive for any constant ε > 0, unless NP⊆ZPP. To our knowledge, these results are significant improvements over the best previously known O(s) competitive ratio bound.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationPrinciples of Distributed Systems - 14th International Conference, OPODIS 2010, Proceedings
Pages348-363
Number of pages16
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event14th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS 2010 - Tozeur, Tunisia
Duration: Dec 14 2010Dec 17 2010

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume6490 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference14th International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems, OPODIS 2010
Country/TerritoryTunisia
CityTozeur
Period12/14/1012/17/10

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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