An Integrated Approach to Transactional Memory on Multi and Many-core Computers

VELOX-funded researchers from Advanced Micro Devices, Technische Universitaet Dresden and Universite den Neuchatel have published their joint work of "Evaluation of AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility within a Complete Transactional Memory Stack" at the EUROSYS 2010 conference in Paris, France.

AMD's Operating System Research Center plays a central role in the EU-funded VELOX project, which targets an integrated approach to transactional memory (TM) on multi and many-core computers.

The VELOX Project held its first External Observer meeting co-located with 23rd International Symposium on Distributed Computing on September 31, 2009 (in Elche, Spain).  During this half-day meeting, VELOX Team members presented project results to and exchanged cutting edge ideas with members of SUN, Yahoo, Microsoft and SAP. 

Sutirtha Sanyal, whose work was partially funded by the VELOX Project won the Best Paper Award for his submission "Dynamically Filtering Thread-Local Variables in Lazy-Lazy Hardware Transactional Memory".  His paper was one of only 57 papers accepted out of the over 240 submissions to the 11th IEEE International Conference on HPCC 09. The Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of papers of exceptional merit in the areas of High Performance Computing and Communications and is based on general quality, originality, contributions, subject matter and timeliness.

AMD has released an experimental specification for a proposed AMD64 architecture feature that may be of interest to all programmers of highly concurrent programs, libraries, runtimes, and operating systems: Advanced Synchronization Facility, or ASF. ASF is intended to make it easier to write efficient, highly concurrent programs. ASF is an experimental architecture extension currently in proposal stage.

Ulrich Drepper spoke about Introducing TM into the Real World at the 42nd IPP Symposium Workshop at
Brown University, Providence (Rhode Island). In his talk, he addressed the challenges that arise when providing
TM support in commercial systems.

Ulrich Drepper received his diploma in computer science from the University of Karlsruhe. He is a long-time participant in the free software development community and was first paid for his contributions in 1996 when he joined the world's first company to support free software, Cygnus Solutions.

Andrey Brito, one researcher of the VELOX project, wins the OpenSPARC Community Innovation Award in the category "Best adaptation of a Single Thread application to Multi-Thread CMT (Chip Multi-Threaded) environment". This award is a Sun Microsystems recognition to foster innovation on a global level and recognize the most interesting initiatives within open source communities worldwide.

La tecnologia multi-core, che combina due o più core su un singolo circuito integrato, permette ai computer di occuparsi contemporaneamente di compiti separati, incrementando quindi le loro prestazioni. Per sfruttare pienamente questa maggiore potenza del computer, si devono scrivere dei software che siano adattati alla tecnologia multi-core.

La technologie multicoeurs associe deux processeurs ou plus sur une même puce de silicium. Elle permet à un ordinateur de traiter en même temps des tâches séparées, ce qui améliore ses performances. Cependant, pour tirer pleinement parti de cette puissance supérieure de calcul, il faut adapter le logiciel à cette technologie.