Software Transactional Memory: An Alternative To Locks

The past few years have marked the start of a historic transition from sequential to parallel computation. The necessity to write parallel programs is increasing as systems are getting more complex while processor speed increases are slowing down. Current parallel programming uses low-level programming constructs like threads and explicit synchronization mechanisms like locks to coordinate thread execution which makes the programs difficult to design, program and debug. Software Transactional Memory (STM) is a promising new approach to programming shared-memory parallel processors. It is a concurrency control mechanism that is widely considered to be easier to use by programmers than other mechanisms such as locking. It allows portions of a program to execute in isolation, without regard to other, concurrently executing tasks. A programmer can reason about the correctness of code within a transaction and need not worry about complex interactions with other, concurrently executing parts of the program. This book presents the concept of Software Transactional Memory (STM), its various advantages and limitations and the concept of writing code using STM.