Unbounded Page-Based Transactional Memory

Exploiting thread level parallelism is paramount in the multi-core era. Transactions enable programmers to expose such parallelism by greatly simplifying the multi-threaded programming model. Virtualized transactions (Unbounded in space and time) are desirable, as they can increase the scope of transactions' use, and thereby further simplify a programmer's job. However, hardware support is essential to support efficient execution of unbounded transactions. In this paper, the authors introduce Page-based Transactional Memory to support unbounded transactions. They combine transaction bookkeeping with the virtual memory system to support fast transaction conflict detection, commit, abort, and to maintain transactions' speculative data.