Applications of the Adaptive Transactional Memory Test Platform

Sun has recently announced it will support a form of "Best effort" hardware transactional memory in its forthcoming multicore processor, code-named "Rock". This paper reports on early results and experience from an exploration of software mechanisms that exploit this feature in a variety of contexts including: explicit transactional programming in the C++ and Java programming languages, explicit lock elision in C++ and implicit lock elision in Java, and use in Java concurrency libraries. This work has been conducted using the Adaptive Transactional Memory Test Platform, which one plans to open source soon to allow other researchers to explore the use of Rock's HTM support.