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Rachid Guerraoui

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The Theory of Transactional Memory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for concurrent programming. This paper is an overview of our recent work on defining a theory of TM. We first present a correctness condition of a TM, ensured by most existing TM implementations. Then, we d ...

2009

A Topological Treatment of Early-Deciding Set-Agreement

Rachid Guerraoui, Bastian Pochon

The k-set-agreement problem consists for a set of n processes to agree on less than k among n possibly different Values, each initially known to only one process. The problem is at the heart of distributed computing and generalizes the celebrated consensus ...

2009

How Live Can a Transactional Memory Be?

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

This paper asks how much liveness a transactional memory (TM) implementation can guarantee. We first devise a formal framework for reasoning about liveness properties of TMs. Then, we prove that the strongest liveness property that a TM can ensure in an as ...

2009

Stretching Transactional Memory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka, Aleksandar Dragojevic

Transactional memory (TM) is an appealing abstraction for programming multi-core systems. Potential target applications for TM, such as business software and video games, are likely to involve complex data structures and large transactions, requiring speci ...

2009

Preventing versus Curing: Avoiding Conflicts in Transactional Memories

Rachid Guerraoui, Aleksandar Dragojevic, Vasu Singh

Transactional memories are typically speculative and rely on contention managers to cure conflicts. This paper explores a complementary approach that prevents conflicts by scheduling transactions according to predictions on their access sets. We first expl ...

2009

Transactors: Unifying Transactions and Actors

Rachid Guerraoui, Martin Odersky, Mohsen Lesani

Composability and deadlock-freedom are important properties that are stated for transactional memory (TM). Commonly, the Semantics of TM requires linearization of transactions. It turns out that linearization of transactions that have cyclic communication ...

2009

Transactions in the Jungle

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka, Vasu Singh

Transactional memory (TM) has shown potential to simplify the task of writing concurrent programs. However, the semantics of interactions between transactions managed by a TM and non-transactional operations, while widely studied, lacks a clear formal spec ...

2009

Why STM can be more than a Research Toy

Rachid Guerraoui, Vincent Gramoli, Aleksandar Dragojevic, Pascal Felber

Software Transactional Memory (STM) promises to simplify concurrent programming without requiring speciﬁc hardware support. Yet, STM’s credibility lies on the extent to which it can leverage multi-cores to outperform sequential code. A recent CACM paper [8 ...

2009

Of Choices, Failures and Asynchrony: The Many Faces of Set Agreement

Rachid Guerraoui, Seth Gilbert, Dan Alistarh

Set agreement is a fundamental problem in distributed computing in which processes collectively choose a small subset of values from a larger set of proposals. The impossibility of fault-tolerant set agreement in asynchronous networks is one of the seminal ...

Springer2009

Stretching Gossip with Live Streaming

Rachid Guerraoui, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Maxime Monod, Davide Frey

Gossip-based information dissemination protocols are considered easy to deploy, scalable and resilient to network dynamics. They are also considered highly ﬂexible, namely tunable at will to increase their robustness and adapt to churn. So far however, the ...

2009