RobuSTM: A Robust Software Transactional Memory

For software transactional memory (STM) to be usable in large applications such as databases, it needs to be robust, i.e., live, efficient, tolerant of crashed and non-terminating transactions, and practical. In this paper, we study the question of whether one can implement a robust software transactional memory in an asynchronous system. To that end, we introduce a system model – the multicore system model (MSM) – which captures the properties provided by mainstream multicore systems. We show how to implement a robust software transactional memory (RobuSTM) in MSM. Our experimental evaluation indicates that RobuSTM compares well against existing blocking and nonblocking software transactional memories in terms of performance while providing a much higher degree of robustness.