Designing a Distributed Software Transactional Memory System

Distributed systems are widely used in high performance computing for performing computationally extensive calculations. In programming terms, distributed systems have usually been exploited through the use of dedicated APIs such as OpenMP and MPI. With these programming models, synchronization is achieved using locks and barriers, and is complex to implement correctly. Transactional memory is a new promising parallel programming model that aims to replace conventional locking mechanisms with transactions. Major transactional memory research has focused on Chip MultiProcessors(CMPs), leaving the area of distributed systems unexplored. In this paper a prototype distributed software transactional memory framework is described.