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SUMMARY:A Transactional Approach To Lock Scalability - Amitabha Roy (Unive
 rsity of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20080610T120000Z
DTEND:20080610T130000Z
UID:TALK12456@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Henry Robinson
DESCRIPTION:\nMost software transactional memory implementations execute c
 ode using \nfine-grained optimistic concurrency control. This does not per
 form well with \nlow contention data structures where fine grained conflic
 t detection means \nmanipulating metadata for every object touched and opt
 imistic concurrency \ncontrol imposes the overhead of making thread privat
 e shadow copies. Also\, a \npurely optimistic approach does not coexist na
 turally with legacy code that is \neither already concurrent using locks o
 r does IO operations that cannot be \nrevoked. We try to address these pro
 blems by presenting a new form of the \nreader writer locks used by the va
 st majority of concurrent code today. Along \nwith the traditional lock/un
 lock operations\, these new locks support STM-like \nmanagement of shadow 
 versions that can be used when desired by the programmer. \nWe show how ex
 isting lock based code can be scaled to perform as well as an \nSTM\, with
  few changes to the existing code base. We also show as a corollary \nthat
  our design allows construction of data structures that retain strict \nfa
 irness between threads\, while simultaneously allowing disjoint access \np
 arallelism.
LOCATION:Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Building\, Room FW11
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