Abstract

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising concurrency control alternative to locks. Recent work [30, 1, 25, 26] has highlighted important memory model issues regarding TM semantics and exposed problems in existing TM implementations. For safe, managed languages such as Java, there is a growing consensus towards strong atomicity semantics as a sound, scalable solution. Strong atomicity has presented a challenge to implement efficiently because it requires instrumentation of nontransactional memory accesses, incurring significant overhead even when a program makes minimal or no use of transactions. To minimize overhead, existing solutions require either a sophisticated type system, specialized hardware, or static whole-program analysis. These techniques

Citations