Michal Kapalka, EPFL, Switzerland
http://kapalka.eu

The Principles and Semantics of Transactional Memory

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for
concurrent programming in the multi-core era. It is as easy to use
as coarse-grained critical sections, yet it can compete in scalability with hand-crafted, fine-grained locking techniques.
In short, a TM allows threads of an application to communicate by executing lightweight, in-memory transactions on the shared data. Transactions are atomic: programmers get the illusion that every transaction is executed instantaneously, at some single and unique
point in time.

The aim of this talk is to give a high-level overview of the semantics
of a TM (what a TM is precisely), basic TM strategies (how to implement and use a TM, what are the trade-offs), and inherent power and
limitations of this paradigm (what can we do using a TM and what is impossible).