Towards transactional memory semantics for C++

Transactional memory (TM) eliminates many problems associated with lock-based synchronization. Over recent years, much progress has been made in software and hardware implementation techniques for TM. However, before transactional memory can be integrated into mainstream programming languages, we must precisely define its meaning in the context of these languages. In particular, TM semantics should address the advanced features present in the existing software TM implementations, such as interactions between transactions and locks, explicit user-level abort and support for legacy code. In this paper, we address these topics from both theoretical and practical points of view. We give precise formulations of several popular TM semantics for the domain of sequentially consistent executions and show that some of these semantics are equivalent for C++ programs that do not contain other forms of synchronization. We show that lock-based semantics, such as Single Global Lock Atomicity (SLA) o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: Tatiana Shpeisman, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Robert Geva, Yang Ni, Adam Welc
• Keywords: Disjoint Lock Atomicity, Global Lock Atomicity, Parallel Computing, Popular Tm Semantics, SPAA 2009