On Closed Nesting in Distributed Transactional Memory

Distributed Software Transactional Memory (D-STM) is a recent but promising model for programming distributed systems. It aims to present programmers with a simple to use abstraction (transactions), while maintaining performance and scalability similar to distributed fine-grained locks. Any complications usually associated with such locks (i.e. distributed deadlock) are avoided. Building upon the previously proposed Transactional Forwarding Algorithm (TFA), we add support for closed nested transactions. We further discuss the performance implications of such nesting, and identify the cases where using nesting is warranted and the relevant parameters for such a decision. To the best of our knowledge, our work contributes the first ever implementation of a D-STM system with support for closed nested transactions and partial aborts.