Unbounded Transactional Memory

Abstract

This article advances the following thesis: transactional memory should be virtualized to support transactions of arbitrary footprint and duration. Such support should be provided through hardware and be made visible to software through the machines instruction set architecture. We call a transactional memory system unbounded if the system can handle transactions of arbitrary duration that have footprints nearly as big as the systems virtual memory. The primary goal of unbounded transactional memory is to make concurrent programming easier without incurring much implementation overhead. Unbounded transactional-memory architectures can achieve high performance in the common case of small transactions, without sacrificing correctness in large transactions