Software Transactional Memory in Multicore Processors

The transactional memory in multicore processors has been a very hot research area over past several years. Many transactional memory systems have been proposed to solve the synchronization problem of multicore processors. Software transactional memory is one of the critical methods to ease parallel programming and improve the scalability in the environment with many cores. In this study, software transactional memory systems for Multicore processors are reviewed according to the following aspects: transaction granularity, version management, conflict detection and synchronization. Finally, we discuss an active research challenge: whether strong isolation should be supported for the tradeoff between performance and semantics correctness in software transactional memory systems.