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Sensoria Bibliography Site A Concurrent Calculus with Atomic Transactions
Lucia Acciai, Michele Boreale, Silvano Dal Zilio
abstract:
The Software Transactional Memory (STM) model is an original approach for controlling concurrent accesses to resources without the need for explicit lock-based synchronization mechanisms. A key feature of STM is to provide a way to group sequences of read and write actions inside atomic blocks, similar to database transactions, whose whole effect should occur atomically.
In this paper, we investigate STM from a process algebra perspective and define an extension of asynchronous CCS with atomic blocks of actions. We show that the addition of atomic transactions results in a very expressive calculus, enough to easily encode other concurrent primitives such as guarded choice and multiset-synchronization (a' la join-calculus). The correctness of our encodings is proved using a suitable notion of bisimulation equivalence. The equivalence is then applied to prove interesting "laws of transactions" and to obtain a simple normal form for transactions.
