Feedback-directed barrier optimization in a strongly isolated STM

Speed improvements in today's processors have largely been delivered in the form of multiple cores, increasing the importance of ions that ease parallel programming. Software transactional memory (STM) addresses many of the complications of concurrency by providing a simple and composable model for safe access to shared data structures. Software transactions extend a language with an atomic primitive that declares that the effects of a block of code should not be interleaved with actions executing concurrently on other threads. Adding barriers to shared memory accesses provides atomicity, consistency and isolation. Strongly isolated STMs preserve the safety properties of transactions for all memory operations in a program, not just those inside an atomic block. Isolation barriers are added to nontransactional loads and stores in such a system to prevent those accesses from observing or corrupting a partially completed transaction. Strong isolation is especially important when int...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Nathan Grasso Bronson, Christos Kozyrakis, Kunle Olukotun
• Keywords: Isolation Barriers, Memory Accesses Provides, POPL 2009, Programming Languages, Strong Isolation