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Department of Information Technology

Transactional Memory Then and Now

Speaker

Kevin Moore


Bio
Kevin Moore is an individual contributor in Oracle Sun Labs. Kevin graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 2007 where his doctoral thesis was Log-Based Transactional Memory (LogTM). Since joining Sun Labs, Kevin has worked on modeling and exploiting the transactional memory feature in Sun's Rock processor and on virtualizing legacy ISAs through dynamic binary translation.

Date and Time

Monday, November 29th, 2010 at 13:30

Location

Polacksbacken, room 1146

Abstract

Over the past several years, Transactional Memory has ridden a wave of interest, rising to unreasonable expectations and, more recently, falling victim to intellectual fatigue. In this talk, I'll give my personal perspective on the research in Transactional Memory over the years since I began work on LogTM seven years ago. I'll discuss the original motivations for LogTM and list some mistakes we made (e.g., confusing TM the programming model with HTM the hardware primitive) and some things we got right (e.g., paying attention to interfaces and finding a role for software). I'll also describe how my perspective changed when I joined Sun and began working with HTM in Sun's Rock processor and potential follow-on systems. Finally, I'll give my own predictions for the future of Transactional Memory research. I hope this talk will be informal with many interruptions and questions.

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Updated  2010-11-26 11:59:33 by Frédéric Haziza.