Transactional Memory: Language Integration

  • Tim Harris | MSRC

Writing concurrent programs is notoriously difficult, and is of increasing practical importance. In this series of lectures I will introduce “transactional memory” (TM) as a technique for building shared memory data structures. As I will illustrate, it can be much easier to build shared memory data structures using TM than it is to use conventional abstractions such as locks, or the atomic compare-and-swap instruction.

In this lecture I will talk about how TM can be integrated into programming languages such as C# or Java, and how an optimizing compiler can drastically improve the performance of a program using TM, and how runtime system components such as the garbage collector can be modified to accommodate programs using TM.

Speaker Details

Tim Harris received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, where he is now a Lecturer in the Systems Research Group. His research interests are in practical concurrent and distributed systems and the programming languages and tools to support them. Current research topics include non-blocking concurrency control primitives, distributed debugging for e-Science applications and the XenoServers public distributed computing project. He is co-author of the
undergraduate text book “Operating Systems” published by Pearson and is a Teaching Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK.

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