Special Issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing: Transactional Memory

Background and Scope Parallel programming in the multicore era is a challenging task, and novel approaches are needed to ease the development of parallel applications. Transactional memory has been proposed as an alternative to the traditional lock-based approach to express and manage concurrency. During the last few years we have seen an increasing interest in programming languages, run-time systems, and hardware to support transactional memory, speculative concurrency, and failure atomicy. The scope of this JPDC special issue on Transactional Memory is intentionally broad in order to cover a wide range of aspects and capture the state-of-the-art of an emerging area. Further, many aspects, from the hardware level, run-time and operating systems, compilers, and up to the application level, must be addressed for transactional memory to become viable and widely accepted.