Invited paper: The inherent complexity of transactional memory and what to do about it

Abstract

This paper overviews some of the lower bounds on the complexity of implementing software transactional memory, and explains their underlying assumptions. It discusses how these lower bounds align with experimental results and design choices made in existing implementations to indicate that the transactional approach for concurrent programming must compromise either programming simplicity or scalability. There are several contemporary research avenues that address the challenge of concurrent programming. For example, optimizing coarse-grained techniques, and concurrent programming with mini-transactions-simple atomic operations on a small number of locations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.