Title: Department of Computer Science Seminar
Date:  Friday 23 May
Time:  2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
Venue: Room N101, CSIT Building [108]


Title:   Transactional Threads for Orthogonal Persistence

Speaker: Antony Hosking (Purdue University)


Abstract:
  Orthogonally persistent programming platforms have been advocated
  as ideal for the development of enterprise applications that embody
  in their implementations sophisticated data models, complex logic,
  and persistence. By integrating the data and control models of the
  programming language with persistence, orthogonally persistent
  programming platforms overcome the impedance mismatch present in
  any a posteriori marriage of programming languages with existing
  database systems. One aspect of this mismatch is the competing
  concurrency mechanisms of programming languages and database systems:
  threads and transactions. Transactions are widely-held to be
  essential for the reliable composition of programs and code that
  manipulate persistent data, yet no persistent programming language
  has come to a full accommodation between transactions and threads.

  We present a model for transactional threads within object-oriented
  orthogonally persistent programming languages, and describe the
  implementation of that model in a prototype persistent extension of
  Modula-3.  This prototype represents the first (to our knowledge)
  full implementation of such a tight coupling between language threads
  and transactions over persistent data.  Experiments using a range of
  workloads from the multi-user OO7 benchmark demonstrate the
  performance advantages of transactional threads compared with
  transactions using traditional differentiated thread and transaction
  models in which transactions are associated only with the operating
  system process. Our results show better performance for update
  transactions, and improved scalability as the degree of concurrency
  and numbers of shared updates increase.

  This is joint work with Adam Welc


Biography:
  Antony Hosking received the Bachelor of Science in Mathematical
  Sciences from the University of Adelaide in May 1985, and the
  Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of
  Waikato in April 1987. He continued his graduate studies at the
  University of Massachusetts, receiving the Ph.D. in February 1995.
  In January 1995 Dr. Hosking was appointed to the faculty of Purdue
  University, in the Department of Computer Sciences, where he now
  holds the rank of Associate Professor.  His work is in the area of
  programming language design and implementation, with specific
  interests in database and persistent programming languages,
  object-oriented database systems, dynamic memory management,
  compiler optimization, and architectural support for programming
  systems.

  Dr. Hosking is a Member of the ACM and IEEE. He was Program Chair
  for the 2000 ACM International Symposium on Memory Management (ISMM),
  and has served on the program committees of ISMM, the ACM Conference
  on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications
  (OOPSLA), and the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
  (VLDB).


URL: http://cs.anu.edu.au/lib/seminars/seminars03/dept20030523