🚀 go-pugleaf

The Transactional Memory tech report is now available by e-mail from the CRL tech
report server.  Note that this is the same tech report previously made available
via anonymous FTP from U Mass.

A new CRL technical report is available:

                 	CRL Technical Report 92/7
                TRANSACTIONAL MEMORY: ARCHITECTURAL SUPPORT 
                       FOR LOCK-FREE DATA STRUCTURES
                          Maurice Herlihy
                          J. Eliot B. Moss
                          December 1, 1992
                                       
A shared data structure is lock-free if its operations do not require
mutual exclusion.  If one process is interrupted in the middle of an
operation, other processes will not be prevented from operating on that
object.  In highly concurrent systems, lock-free data structures avoid common
problems associated with conventional locking techniques, including priority
inversion, convoying, and difficulty of avoiding deadlock.  This paper
introduces transactional memory, a new multiprocessor architecture that
supports lock-free implementations of complex data structures in a simple and
efficient way.  Transactional memory allows programmers to define customized
read-modify-write operations that apply to multiple, independently-chosen
words of memory.  It is implemented by straightforward extensions to any
ownership-based multiprocessor cache-coherence protocol.  Simulation results
show that transactional memory outperforms the best known locking techniques
for simple benchmarks, even in the absence of priority inversion, convoying,
and deadlock.

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Michelle Gillespie                                        Cambridge Research Lab
michelle@crl.dec.com                                      Digital Equipment Corp.