Mostly-optimistic concurrency control for highly contended dynamic workloads on a thousand cores
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Future servers will be equipped with thousands of CPU cores and deep memory hierarchies. Traditional concurrency control (CC) schemes---both optimistic and pessimistic---slow down orders of magnitude in such environments for highly contended workloads. Optimistic CC (OCC) scales the best for workloads with few conflicts, but suffers from clobbered reads for high conflict workloads. Although pessimistic locking can protect reads, it floods cache-coherence backbones in deep memory hierarchies and can also cause numerous deadlock aborts. This paper proposes a new CC scheme, mostly-optimistic concurrency control (MOCC), to address these problems. MOCC achieves orders of magnitude higher performance for dynamic workloads on modern servers. The key objective of MOCC is to avoid clobbered reads for high conflict workloads, without any centralized mechanisms or heavyweight interthread communication. To satisfy such needs, we devise a native, cancellable reader-writer spinlock and a serializable protocol that can acquire, release and re-acquire locks in any order without expensive interthread communication. For low conflict workloads, MOCC maintains OCC's high performance without taking read locks. Our experiments with high conflict YCSB workloads on a 288-core server reveal that MOCC performs 8× and 23× faster than OCC and pessimistic locking, respectively. It achieves 17 million TPS for TPC-C and more than 110 million TPS for YCSB without conflicts, 170× faster than pessimistic methods.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it