Building and Using the ATLAS Transactional Memory System

System Challenges and Opportunities for Transactional Memory a Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Committee on Graduate Studies of Stanford University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Recent trends in architecture have made chip multiprocessors (CMPs) increasingly common. CMPs provide programmers with an unprecedented opportunity for parallel execution. Nevertheless, the key factor limiting their potential is the complexity of parallel application development using primitives such as locks and condition variables. While transactional memory (TM) is a technique that helps wit...

On Closed Nesting in Distributed Transactional Memory

Distributed Software Transactional Memory (D-STM) is a recent but promising model for programming distributed systems. It aims to present programmers with a simple to use abstraction (transactions), while maintaining performance and scalability similar to distributed fine-grained locks. Any complications usually associated with such locks (i.e. distributed deadlock) are avoided. Building upon t...

On Open Nesting in Distributed Transactional Memory: Technical Report

Distributed Transactional Memory (DTM) is a recent but promising model for programming distributed systems. It aims to present programmers with a simple to use distributed concurrency control abstraction (transactions), while maintaining performance and scalability similar to distributed fine-grained locks. Any complications usually associated with such locks (e.g., distributed deadlocks) are a...

Atlas: Software Development Environment for Hardware Transactional Memory a Dissertation Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Committee on Graduate Studies of Stanford University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Multi-cores are already available on today’s personal computers, and parallel programming is the key to utilizing their scalable performance. However, writing a fast and correct parallel program is still difficult because multiple threads run on the shared data; thus, programmers should synchronize them properly. To address this difficulty, Transactional Memory (TM) has been proposed as an alte...

Software transactional memory building blocks