Abstract: For the last five years, Transactional Memory (TM) has been widely hailed as a way to simplify synchronization in multithreaded programs. Unfortunately, recent work has revealed a surprising array of difficult semantic issues, which threaten to jeopardize the original goal of programming simplicity. After briefly surveying the state of the art -- and the areas that seem most in need of formal verification -- this talk will focus on language and compiler approaches to two particular issues: (a) the desire to avoid bookkeeping overhead on loads and stores whenever possible, without forcing the programmer to overly annotate source code; (b) the need to distinguish between privatization (the safe, temporary use of shared data by a single thread) and erroneous unprotected access. Rather than advocate a particular programming model, the presentation will attempt to lay out major options and to illuminate tradeoffs among them.

Bio: Michael L. Scott is a Professor and past Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. His research interests span operating systems, languages, architecture, and tools, with a particular emphasis on parallel and distributed systems. He is best known for work in synchronization algorithms and concurrent data structures, in recognition of which he shared the 2006 SIGACT/SIGOPS Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize. Other widely cited work has addressed parallel operating systems and file systems, software distributed shared memory, and energy-conscious operating systems and microarchitecture. His textbook on programming language design and implementation (Programming Language Pragmatics, second edition, Morgan Kaufmann, Nov. 2005) has become a standard in the field. In 2003 he served as General Chair for SOSP; more recently he has been Program Chair for TRANSACT'07 and PPoPP'08. In 2001 he received the University of Rochester's Robert and Pamela Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching.

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by H^EV^EA.