Transactional programming in a multi-core environment
Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Christos Kozyrakis, Bratin Saha · 2007
With single thread performance starting to plateau, HW architects have turned to chip level multiprocessing (CMP) to increase processing power. All major microprocessor companies are aggressively shipping multi-core products in the mainstream computing market. Moore's law will largely be used to increase HW thread-level parallelism through higher core counts in a CMP environment. CMPs bring new challenges into the design of the software system stack.In this tutorial, we talk about the shift to multi-core processors and the programming implications. In particular, we focus on transactional programming. Transactions have emerged as a promising alternative to lock-based synchronization that eliminates many of the problems associated with lock-based synchronization. We discuss the design of both hardware and software transactional memory and quantify the tradeoffs between the different design points. We show how to extend the Java and C languages with transactional constructs, and how to integrate transactions with compiler optimizations and the language runtime (e.g., memory manager and garbage collection).