Concurrency control with data coloring

Abstract

Concurrency control is one of the main sources of error and complexity in shared memory parallel programming. While there are several techniques to handle concurrency control such as locks and transactional memory, simplifying concurrency control has proved elusive. In this paper we introduce the Data Coloring programming model, based on the principles of our previous work on architecture support for data-centric synchronization. The main idea is to group data structures into consistency domains and mark places in the control flow where data should be consistent. Based on these annotations, the system dynamically infers transaction boundaries. An important aspect of data coloring is that the occurrence of a synchronization defect is typically determinate and leads to a violation of liveness rather than to a safety violation. Finally, this paper includes empirical data that shows that most of the critical sections in large applications are used in a data-centric manner. Copyright © 2008 ACM.