On maintaining multiple versions in STM

Abstract

An effective way to reduce the number of aborts in software transactional memory (STM) is to keep multiple versions of transactional objects. In this paper, we study inherent properties of STMs that use multiple versions to guarantee successful commits of all read-only transactions. We first show that these STMs cannot be disjoint-access parallel. We then consider the problem of garbage collecting old object versions, and show that no STM can be optimal in the number of previous versions kept. Moreover, we show that garbage collecting useless versions is impossible in STMs that implement invisible reads. Finally, we present an STM algorithm using visible reads that efficiently garbage collects useless object versions.