Contents (hide)
   1 Class Number
   2 When and Where
   3 Outline
   4 Requirements

Welcome to Advanced Topics on Transactional Memory Seminar homepage

Class Number

20225621

When and Where

Sundays, 14-16; class 114, building 34

Outline

While being used in the past mainly for high-end server machines, shared-memory multiprocessors, and specifically multi-core machines, have became the standard on desktop and laptop computers. Algorithms for multiprocessor systems are, in general, more complicated than sequential algorithms. This is because of the need to synchronize and coordinate threads running on different processors. Lock-based synchronization is either not scalable (if coarse-grained locks are used) or is error-prone (if fine-grained locks are used).

This seminar studies Transactional Memory, a relatively new programming abstraction for multiprocessors that is the focus of intense research by companies such as Sun, Intel, IBM and Microsoft. Borrowing ideas from database transactions and applying them to shared-memory synchronization, it is considered to have the potential of supporting efficient and easy-to-use synchronization.

In the first two or three seminar meetings, I will give introductory lectures that will provide you with the concepts required to access this very active area of research. In later meetings, student talks will be given.


Requirements

Students that take this seminar will have to meet the following two requirements.
  1. A list of research papers dealing with Transactional Memory and related subjects will be provided. You will have to choose one such paper, study it, prepare a presentation and give a seminar talk.
  2. Typically, students attend the talk that they themselves give …-:). In this seminar, however, it is required that you also attend talks given by others. Specifically, students must participate in at least 80% of all seminar meetings, force major notwithstanding. Moreover, we encourage active participation; that is, we would like student talks to stimulate discussions and your active participation in these discussions is desirable.