Transactional Memory - STM In The Small

Опубликовано 12 августа 2016, 1:13

Writing concurrent programs is notoriously difficult, and is of increasing practical importance. In this series of lectures I will introduce ΓÇ£transactional memoryΓÇ¥ (TM) as a technique for building shared memory data structures. As I will illustrate, it can be much easier to build shared memory data structures using TM than it is to use conventional abstractions such as locks, or the atomic compare-and-swap instruction. In this lecture I will talk about some recent work on a system we call ΓÇ£SpecTMΓÇ¥. SpecTM is a software implementation of TM which we have adapted to let it be used in building high-performance implementations of data structures such as hash tables and skip lists. I will present some of our recent performance results, showing how data structures built using SpecTM can perform as well as data structures built over lower-level primitives by expert programmers.