Semantics of transactional memory and automatic mutual exclusion

Automatic Mutual Exclusion

We propose a new concurrent programming model, Automatic Mutual Exclusion (AME). In contrast to lock-based programming, and to other programming models built over software transactional memory (STM), we arrange that all shared state is implicitly protected unless the programmer explicitly specifies otherwise. An AME program is composed from serializable atomic fragments. We include features all...

Automatic Mutual Exclusion and Atomicity Checks

This paper provides an introduction to the Automatic Mutual Exclusion (AME) programming model and to its formal study, through the AME calculus. AME resembles cooperative multithreading; in the intended implementations, however, software transactional memory supports the concurrent execution of atomic fragments. This paper also studies simple dynamic and static mechanisms for atomicity checks i...

Sequential Specification of Transactional Memory Semantics

Transactional memory (TM) provides a general-purpose mechanism with which to construct concurrent objects. Transactional memory can also be thought of as a concurrent object, but its semantics are less clear than those of the objects typically constructed on top of it. In particular, commit operations in a transactional memory may fail when transactions conflict. Under what circumstances, exact...

Ordering-Based Semantics for Software Transactional Memory

It has been widely suggested that memory transactions should behave as if they acquired and released a single global lock. Unfortunately, this behavior can be expensive to achieve, particularly when— as in the natural publication/privatization idiom—the same data are accessed both transactionally and nontransactionally. To avoid overhead, we propose selective strict serializability (SSS) semant...

Bounds on Shared Memory for Mutual Exclusion