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SUMMARY:Transactional Memory - Amitabha Roy
DTSTART:20080226T130000Z
DTEND:20080226T140000Z
UID:TALK10877@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Henry Robinson
DESCRIPTION:Transactional memory is an idea from back in 1995 that has rec
 ently become \npopular because of the move towards multicore architectures
 . It promises to \nmake fine grained parallelism available at no extra pro
 gramming cost to single \nthreaded serial algorithms. However some problem
 s with TM prevent its easy \nadoption. For one\, privatization is a signif
 icant overhead in some \ncircumstances. It also does not co-exist with leg
 acy lock based access. \nFinally it does not allow irrevocable actions suc
 h as IO\nwithin a transaction.\n\nIn this talk I'll cover some *very preli
 minary* ideas towards solving some of \nthese problems. I will present a s
 calable lock design that can be acquired \nboth in transactional and non-t
 ransactional mode and give examples that should \nserve to highlight how t
 his can make TM more applicable to real world \nproblems. Finally I will s
 how an interesting application of scalable locks to \nbuild data structure
 s that are perfectly concurrent and provide fair access \nsemantics to thr
 eads (each thread will ultimately get to complete its access \nwithin a bo
 unded number of critical section completions by other threads).
LOCATION:Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Building\, Room FW11
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