Directed Research Project Details

Concurrent Applications and Transactional Memory

Abstract

Transactional programming models have been proposed as an important part of the evolution of threaded programming in shared memory environments; however, a critical shortcoming of these models is their inability to function and compose properly in the presence of operations that do not have a transactional nature (e.g., system calls).

We explain these shortcomings, discuss potential improvements to these models as proposed in our work "Transactions in Isolation and Cooperation", and examine these proposals in the context of simple motivating examples as well as numerous real-world threaded applications.