Wed 20 Jun 2018 16:35 - 17:00 at Grand Ballroom AB - Transactions and Races Chair(s): Tatiana Shpeisman

Programming concurrent, distributed systems is hard—especially when these systems mutate shared, persistent state replicated at geographic scale. To enable high availability and scalability, a new class of weakly consistent data stores has become popular. However, some data needs strong consistency. To manipulate both weakly and strongly consistent data in a single transaction, we introduce a new abstraction: mixed-consistency transactions, embodied in a new embedded language, MixT. Programmers explicitly associate consistency models with remote storage sites; each atomic, isolated transaction can access a mixture of data with different consistency models. Compile-time information-flow checking, applied to consistency models, ensures that these models are mixed safely and enables the compiler to automatically partition transactions into a single sub-transaction per consistency model. New run-time mechanisms ensure that consistency models can also be mixed safely, even when the data used by a transaction resides on separate, mutually unaware stores. Performance measurements show that despite their stronger guarantees, mixed-consistency transactions retain much of the speed of weak consistency, significantly outperforming traditional serializable transactions.

Wed 20 Jun

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16:10 - 17:25
Transactions and RacesPLDI Research Papers at Grand Ballroom AB
Chair(s): Tatiana Shpeisman Google Brain
16:10
25m
Talk
The Semantics of Transactions and Weak Memory in x86, Power, ARM, and C++
PLDI Research Papers
Nathan Chong ARM Ltd., Tyler Sorensen Imperial College London, John Wickerson Imperial College London
Media Attached
16:35
25m
Talk
MixT: A Language for Mixing Consistency in Geodistributed Transactions
PLDI Research Papers
Mae Milano Cornell University, Andrew Myers Cornell University
Media Attached
17:00
25m
Talk
Bounding Data Races in Space and Time
PLDI Research Papers
Stephen Dolan University of Cambridge, KC Sivaramakrishnan University of Cambridge, Anil Madhavapeddy OCaml Labs
Media Attached