McRT-STM: a high performance software transactional memory system for a multi-core runtime

Applications need to become more concurrent to take advantage of the increased computational power provided by chip level multiprocessing. Programmers have traditionally managed this concurrency using locks (mutex based synchronization). Unfortunately, lock based synchronization often leads to deadlocks, makes fine-grained synchronization difficult, hinders composition of atomic primitives, and provides no support for error recovery. Transactions avoid many of these problems, and therefore, promise to ease concurrent programming. We describe a software transactional memory (STM) system that is part of McRT, an experimental Multi-Core RunTime. The McRT-STM implementation uses a number of novel algorithms, and supports advanced features such as nested transactions with partial aborts, conditional signaling within a transaction, and object based conflict detection for C/C++ applications. The McRT-STM exports interfaces that can be used from C/C++ programs directly or as a target for comp...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Bratin Saha, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Richard L. Hudson, Chi Cao Minh, Ben Hertzberg
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Object Based Conflict, PPOPP 2006, Software Transactional Memory, Transactional Memory