CPA-SEL-T: Collaborative Research: Unified Open Source Transactional Infrastructure

As general-purpose computing moves into the age of pervasive parallelism, programmability becomes the key hurdle limiting the effective use of available computing resources. Transactional memory promises to simplify parallel programming for application programmers. However, research in Transactional Memory is being seriously hampered by the lack of a reusable open source infrastructure. The project will develop the key pieces necessary to overcome this situation: A transactional memory library built out of highly decomposed pieces will provide reusable and replaceable parts suitable for investigating tradeoffs in software TM implementations. Standardized interfaces will allow libraries conforming to the interfaces to be used in a variety of environments. TM-aware run-time analysis tools, particularly profilers and debuggers, will provide the necessary tool support for TM implementors and application programmers to understand and improve the performance of software using transactions. Interesting benchmarks, in a variety of high-level languages, will move forward our understanding of TM performance characteristics.