Transactional Memory: Glimmer of a Theory (Invited Paper)

The Theory of Transactional Memory

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for concurrent programming. This paper is an overview of our recent work on defining a theory of TM. We first present a correctness condition of a TM, ensured by most existing TM implementations. Then, we describe two progress properties that characterize the two main classes of TM implementations: obstructionfree and lock-based TMs. We use thes...

Designing a Software Transactional Memory for Peer-to-Peer Systems

Transactional memory is a rather novel approach to concurrency control in parallel computing, that has just recently found its way into distributed systems research. However, the research concentrates mainly on single processor solutions or cluster environment. In this paper we argue, that peer-to-peer systems would require a different design of transactional memory because of the increased fai...

Distributed Computing: A Glimmer of a Theory

Scientific publications in XML - towards a global knowledge base

We are delighted to be invited to contribute to the new CODATA journal which is being launched at a critical time for the scientific world's data, information and knowledge. This article reflects a presentation at CODATA2000 (Baveno, Italy, 2000) by P-MR. It illustrates some of the ways forward in STM (Scientific, Technical and Medical) publishing and discusses how it could go beyond the tradit...

Dependence-Aware Transactional Memory

Transactional memory is a promising programming model to enable high performance programs with reasonable programmer effort on the parallel architectures favored by modern processor manufacturers. This paper introduces dependence-aware transactions, a new method for maintaining the conflict serializability safety property of memory transactions while allowing significant freedom for an implemen...