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Software Transactional Memory: Why is it only a Research Toy?

The article discusses software transactional memory (STM), examining aspects of STM that undermine its initial promise including its overheads and workload applicabilities. Transaction memory (TM) is a concurrency control paradigm that provides atomic and isolated execution for regions of code, the...

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Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 51; no. 11; pp. 40 - 47
Main Authors: CA&#x...CAVAL, CĂLIN, BLUNDELL, COLIN, MICHAEL, MAGED, CAIN, HAROLD W., PENG WU, CHIRAS, STEFANIE, CHATTERJEE, SIDDHARTHA
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Nov2008
Subjects:
Parallel programs (Computer programs)
Parallel computer software
Computer programming
Computer science
Electronic data processing
Database management software
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:The article discusses software transactional memory (STM), examining aspects of STM that undermine its initial promise including its overheads and workload applicabilities. Transaction memory (TM) is a concurrency control paradigm that provides atomic and isolated execution for regions of code, the authors states. Other topics include the performance of highly optimized STM, the poor performance of TM at low levels of parallelism, and tradeoffs which impact the performance and programmability of TM systems.