What Theory for Transactional Memory?

Workshop in conjunction with DISC'09

The Transaction Memory paradigm is argued to be as easy to use as coarse-grained locking, and nearly as efficient on multi-core systems as hand-crafted, fine-grained locking. It is thus not surprising to see a large body of work dedicated to implementing the paradigm and exploring its limitations. Very little work has however been devoted to explore its theoretical ramifications. This workshop will be devoted to discussing those ramifications. It will be organized on the 22nd of September, in conjunction with DISC 2009 (http://disc2009.gsyc.es/).

Speakers will include We will welcome students to also give talks. Graduate students who are interested in giving a talk should send a message to Vincent.Gramoli<at>epfl.ch by August 1st 2009, with a one page abstract of their research work.

Organizers: Rachid Guerraoui (EPFL) and Vincent Gramoli (EPFL and Univ. of Neuchâtel).

The registration to this workshop is joint with the DISC Conference.

Program

Time Speaker Slides
08:30-08:50 Christof Fetzer Robust Transactional Memory and the Multicore System Model
08:50-09:10 Maged Michael STM Conflict-Free Complexity Trade-Offs
09:10-09:30 Michal Kapalka Do we need a new Theory for TMs?
09:30-09:50 Nir Shavit On Capturing Progress Conditions for STMs
09:50-10:10 Pacsal Felber On Semantics and Performance of STMs
10:10-10:30 Panel
Coffee Break
11:00-11:20 Tim Harris Define semantics for languages, not for TM
11:20-11:40 Dmitri Perelman On Maintaining Multiple Versions in STM
11:40-12:00 Victor Luchangco Beyond Simple Transactions and Atomic Blocks
12:00-12:20 Alessia Milani Inherent Limitations on Disjoint-Access Parallel Implementations of Transactional Memory
12:20-12:40 Torvald Riegel What Gap Between TM Theory and DB Theory?
12:40-13:00 Aleksandar Dragojevic What Complexity for TM Performance?
Lunch
15:00-15:20 Hagit Attiya Sequential Reductions for Verifying Serializability
15:20-15:40 Vasu Singh Parametrized Opacity
15:40-16:00 Mark Moir Formally Proving TM Correctness Conditions
16:00-16:20 Damien Imbs Virtual World Consistency: a new Consistency Criterion for Software Transactional Memories
16:20-16:40 Maurice Helihy (presentation by Eric Koskinen) Commutativity Semantics for Coarse-Grained Transactions
16:40-17:00 Panel

A summary of this workshop is part of the December issue of the distributed computing column of ACM SIGACT News 40(4).