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SUMMARY:Software lock elision for x86 machine code - Amitabha Roy
DTSTART:20111026T100000Z
DTEND:20111026T110000Z
UID:TALK34233@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Prof Simon Moore
DESCRIPTION:Software transactional memory has captured the imagination of 
 the\nresearch community for much of the past decade but has spectacularly\
 nfailed to be deployed in either software or spawn any hardware\nvariants.
  One of the reasons for this is the high development costs of\nintegrating
  transactional memory with traditional software stacks:\nprogramming langu
 age\, compiler and debugger. On solution to this is to\nenable transaction
 s to be applied directly to machine code (in this\ncase\, x86 machine code
 ) in order to elide legacy locks\, an approach\nthat neatly solves all the
 se problem while retaining backward\ncompatibility. There are two major st
 umbling blocks to this approach\,\nsolutions to which will be covered in t
 he talk. The first is that\nruntime instrumentation of machine code is an 
 expensive affair as\nusers of dynamic binary rewriting engines are aware o
 f. The second is\nthat software transactional memory runtimes are usually 
 built with\nrelaxed language level memory consistency models in mind. The 
 x86\nmemory consistency model (only recently formally defined) is much\nst
 ricter needing a whole new approach to building an STM for it.\n
LOCATION:SC04\, Computer Laboratory\, William Gates Building
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