Software transactional memory

In computer science, software transactional memory (STM) is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It is an alternative to lock-based synchronization. STM is a strategy implemented in software, rather than as a hardware component. A transaction in this context occurs when a piece of code executes a series of reads and writes to shared memory. These reads and writes logically occur at a single instant in time; intermediate states are not visible to other (successful) transactions. The idea of providing hardware support for transactions originated in a 1986 paper by Tom Knight.[1] The idea was popularized by Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss.[2] In 1995, Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou extended this idea to software-only transactional memory (STM).[3] Since 2005, STM has been the focus of intense research[4] and support for practical implementations is growing.

  1. ^ Tom Knight. An architecture for mostly functional languages. Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on Lisp and functional programming.
  2. ^ Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss. Transactional memory: architectural support for lock-free data structures. Proceedings of the 20th annual international symposium on Computer architecture (ISCA '93). Volume 21, Issue 2, May 1993.
  3. ^ Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou. Software transactional memory. Distributed Computing. Volume 10, Number 2. February 1997.
  4. ^ ""software transactional memory" - Google Scholar". Retrieved 10 November 2013.