Concurrency control with data coloring

Concurrency control is one of the main sources of error and complex-ity in shared memory parallel programming. While there are several techniques to handle concurrency control such as locks and transac-tional memory, simplifying concurrency control has proved elusive. In this paper we introduce theData Coloring programming model, based on the principles of our previous work on architecture support for data-centric synchronization. The main idea is to group data struc-tures into consistency domains and mark places in the control flow where data should be consistent. Based on these annotations, the sys-tem dynamically infers transaction boundaries. An important aspect of data coloring is that the occurrence of a synchronization defect is typically determinate and leads to a violation of liveness rather than to a safety violation. Finally, this paper includes empirical data that shows that most of the critical sections in large applications are used in a data-centric manner