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Invited Paper: The Inherent Complexity of Transactional Memory and What to Do about It

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Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6522))

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Abstract

This paper overviews some of the lower bounds on the complexity of implementing software transactional memory, and explains their underlying assumptions. It discusses how these lower bounds align with experimental results and design choices made in existing implementations to indicate that the transactional approach for concurrent programming must compromise either programming simplicity or scalability. There are several contemporary research avenues that address the challenge of concurrent programming. For example, optimizing coarse-grained techniques, and concurrent programming with mini-transactions—simple atomic operations on a small number of locations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Technion, Israel

    Hagit Attiya

Authors
  1. Hagit Attiya
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, 1065 La Avenida – bldg. 6, 94043, Mountain View, CA, USA

    Marcos K. Aguilera

  2. School of Computing, National University of Singapore, COM2-04-25, 15 Computing Drive, 117418, Republic of Singapore

    Haifeng Yu

  3. 458 Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MC-228, 1308 West Main Street, 61801, Urbana, IL, USA

    Nitin H. Vaidya

  4. Alcatel-Lucent Technologies, Manyata Technology Park, Nagawara, 560045, Bangalore, India

    Vikram Srinivasan

  5. ECE Department, Duke University, 130 Hudson Hall, Box 90291, 27708, Durham, NC, USA

    Romit Roy Choudhury

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Attiya, H. (2011). Invited Paper: The Inherent Complexity of Transactional Memory and What to Do about It. In: Aguilera, M.K., Yu, H., Vaidya, N.H., Srinivasan, V., Choudhury, R.R. (eds) Distributed Computing and Networking. ICDCN 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6522. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17679-1_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17679-1_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-17678-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-17679-1

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