
Principles of Transactional Memory
Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Published on 30. September 2010
Book
Paperback/Softback
193 pages
978-1-60845-011-4 (ISBN)
Description
Transactional memory (TM) is an appealing paradigm for concurrent programming on shared memory architectures. With a TM, threads of an application communicate, and synchronize their actions, via in-memory transactions. Each transaction can perform any number of operations on shared data, and then either commit or abort. When the transaction commits, the effects of all its operations become immediately visible to other transactions; when it aborts, however, those effects are entirely discarded. Transactions are atomic: programmers get the illusion that every transaction executes all its operations instantaneously, at some single and unique point in time. Yet, a TM runs transactions concurrently to leverage the parallelism offered by modern processors. The aim of this book is to provide theoretical foundations for transactional memory. This includes defining a model of a TM, as well as answering precisely when a TM implementation is correct, what kind of properties it can ensure, what are the power and limitations of a TM, and what inherent trade-offs are involved in designing a TM algorithm. While the focus of this book is on the fundamental principles, its goal is to capture the common intuition behind the semantics of TMs and the properties of existing TM implementations.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
San Rafael
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 187 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-60845-011-4 (9781608450114)
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Schweitzer Classification
Content
- Introduction
- Shared Memory Systems
- Transactional Memory: A Primer
- TM Correctness Issues
- Implementing a TM
- Further Reading
- Opacity
- Proving Opacity: An Example
- Opacity vs.\ Atomicity
- Further Reading
- The Liveness of a TM
- Lock-Based TMs
- Obstruction-Free TMs
- General Liveness of TMs
- Further Reading
- Conclusions
- Shared Memory Systems
- Transactional Memory: A Primer
- TM Correctness Issues
- Implementing a TM
- Further Reading
- Opacity
- Proving Opacity: An Example
- Opacity vs.\ Atomicity
- Further Reading
- The Liveness of a TM
- Lock-Based TMs
- Obstruction-Free TMs
- General Liveness of TMs
- Further Reading
- Conclusions