On improving the ease of use of the software transactional memory abstraction. (Faciliter l'utilisation des mémoires transactionnelles logicielles)

Multicore architectures are changing the way we write programs. Writing concurrent programsis well known to be difficult task. Traditionally, the use of locks allowing code to executein mutual exclusion has been the most widely used abstraction to write concurrent programs.Unfortunately, using locks it is difficult to write correct concurrent programs that perform ef-ficiently. Additionally, locks present other problems such as scalability issues. Transactionalmemory has been proposed as a possible promising solution to these difficulties of writing con-current programs. Transactions can be viewed as a high level abstraction or methodology forwriting concurrent programs, allowing the programmer to be able to declare what sections of hiscode should be executed atomically, without having to worry about synchronization details. Un-fortunately, although arguably easier to use then locks, transactional memory still suffers fromperformance and ease of use problems. In fact many concepts surrounding the usage and se-mantics of transactions have no widely agreed upon standards. This thesis specifically focuseson these ease of use problems by discussing how previous research has dealt with them andproposing new solutions putting ease of use first.The thesis starts with a chapter giving a brief overview of software transactional memory(STM) as well as a discussion of the problem of ease of use that is focused on in the laterchapters. The research contributions are then divided into four main chapters, each looking atdifferent approaches working towards making transactional memory easier to use.