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Research Funding:

Software Transactional Memory

Support provided by Microsoft Research

Description

Systems designers and software engineers can no longer rely on increasing clock speed to propel ever more ambitious applications, but must instead learn to make effective use of increasing parallelism. Unfortunately, conventional synchronization techniques based on locks and conditions are subject to well-known limitations, and are unlikely to be effective in such a demanding environment. Transactional memory is an alternative computational model in which threads synchronize by optimistic transactions, which promise to alleviate many of the problems associated with locking.

We propose to overhaul SXM, a software transactional memory package for C# we developed while on sabbatical at Microsoft Research Cambridge. SXM supports atomic object factories that allow users to their own run-time synchronization mechanisms. We plan to revisit this design to make it more accessible (users will define new factories in C# instead of MSIL), and add new features to support a range of recently-proposed STM architectures and algorithms.

We will use the new SXM2 as a platform for our own research, as a way to attract undergraduate and graduate students to research in this area, and we will release the source under license so that others may do the same.

Principal Investigator

Maurice Herlihy

Projects Supported

Details

Amount:$75,000
Dates:1/2007-12/2007
Status:Active

Page Owner: ldr Last Modified: Thu Jan 11 17:32:42 2007