Adaptive Software Transactional Memory

Abstract

This thesis addresses the problem of contention management in Software Transactional Memory (STM), which is a scheme for managing shared memory in a concurrent programming environment. STM views shared memory in a way similar to that of a database; read and write operations are handled through transactions, with changes to the shared memory becoming permanent through commit operations. Research on this subject reveals that there are currently varying methods for collision detection, data validation, and contention management, each of which has different situations in which they become the preferred method. This thesis introduces a dynamic contention manager that monitors current performance and chooses the proper contention manager accordingly. Performance calculations, and subsequent polling of the underlying library, are minimized. As a result, this adaptive contention manager yields a higher average performance level over time when compared with existing static implementations.