3/03/2011

Transactional Memory, 2nd Edition - PDF

Transactional Memory, 2nd EditionBook Description
The advent of multicore processors has renewed interest in the idea  of incorporating transactions into the programming model used to write  parallel programs. This approach, known as transactional memory, offers  an alternative, and hopefully better, way to coordinate concurrent  threads. The ACI (atomicity, consistency, isolation) properties of  transactions provide a foundation to ensure that concurrent reads and  writes of shared data do not produce inconsistent or incorrect results.  At a higher level, a computation wrapped in a transaction executes  atomically – either it completes successfully and commits its result in  its entirety or it aborts. In addition, isolation ensures the  transaction produces the same result as if no other transactions were  executing concurrently. Although transactions are not a parallel  programming panacea, they shift much of the burden of synchronizing and  coordinating parallel computations from a programmer to a compiler, to a  language runtime system, or to hardware. The challenge for the system  implementers is to build an efficient transactional memory  infrastructure. This book presents an overview of the state of the art  in the design and implementation of transactional memory systems, as of  early spring 2010.

Table of Contents:

  1. Introduction
  2. Basic Transactions
  3. Building on Basic Transactions
  4. Software  Transactional Memory
  5. Hardware-Supported Transactional Memory
  6. Conclusions

Book Details

  • Paperback: 264 pages
  • Publisher: Morgan and Claypool Publishers; 2nd Edition (June, 2010)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1608452352
  • ISBN-13: 978-1608452354
  • File Size: 7.7 MiB
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