Noninvasive concurrency with Java STM

In this paper we present a complete, compiler independent, Java STM framework called Deuce, intended as a development platform for scalable concurrent applications and as a research tool for designing STM algorithms. Deuce provides several benefits over existing Java STM frameworks: it avoids any changes or additions to the JVM, it does not require language extensions or intrusive APIs, and it does not impose any memory footprint or GC overhead. To support legacy libraries, Deuce dynamically instruments classes at load time and uses an original “field-based” locking strategy to improve concurrency. Deuce also provides a simple internal API allowing different STMs algorithms to be plugged in. We show empirical results that highlight the scalability of our framework running benchmarks with hundreds of concurrent threads. This paper shows, for the first time, that one can actually design a Java STM with reasonable performance, without compiler