Software Transactional Memory

Software transactional memory building blocks

An Integrated Hardware-Software Approach to Transactional Memory

Transactional memory has been proposed as a general and flexible way to allow programs to read and modify disparate primary-memory locations atomically as a single operation, much as a database transaction can atomically modify many records on disk. Hardware transactional memory supports atomicity through architectural means, whereas software transactional memory supports atomicity through lang...

Debugging with Transactional Memory

Transactional programming promises to substantially simplify the development of correct, scalable, and efficient concurrent programs. Designs for supporting transactional programming using transactional memory implemented in hardware, software, and a mixture of the two have emerged recently. To our knowledge, nobody has yet addressed issues involved with debugging programs executed using transa...

Software lock elision for x86 machine code

More than a decade after becoming a topic of intense research there is no transactional memory hardware nor any examples of software transactional memory use outside the research community. Using software transactional memory in large pieces of software needs copious source code annotations and often means that standard compilers and debuggers can no longer be used. At the same time, overheads ...

Two Interfaces to the RSTM Transactional Memory System∗

Software transactional memory is a promising new paradigm for concurrent programming. We explore the design of the application programmer interface to RSTM [MSH06] and propose language extensions to C++ that alleviate some of the unavoidable difficulties with the API. 1 The Transactional Memory Model