RuLAM Project: Speculative Parallelization for Java using Software Transactional Memory∗

The era of multicore processors, capable of running multiple tasks concurrently, has arrived. Sadly, most existing software and even new applications being developed are not ready to take advantage of these new multiprocessing capabilities, and, thus, more processing cores do not translate into better performance when executing these applications. To tackle this problem, we envision the creation of a runtime environment that is able to parallelize automatically existing sequential applications without requiring any manual modification to those applications. To achieve this goal, we are exploring thread-level speculation supported by a Software Transactional Memory (STM), rather than relying on hardware-based mechanisms. In this paper, we present our work in the RuLAM project, which targets speculative parallelization on the Java platform.