Hardware approaches to transactional memory in chip multiprocessors

Book chapter, 2015

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015. Multicores are nowadays at the heart of almost every computational system, from the smartphone in our pocket, to the server-class machines in datacenters that provide us with a myriad of cloud services. With the advent of chip multiprocessors, the shift to mainstream parallel architectures is inevitable, and both programmers and architects are presented with immense opportunities and enormous challenges. Despite the fact that multiprocessor systems have existed for a long time, multi-threaded programming has not been much of a focus. Instead, multiprocessors were of interest only to the small community of high-performance computing (HPC), and so was parallel programming, which was mostly ignored by software vendors, and not widely investigated nor taught. As a matter of fact, most software development over time has been predicated on single-core hardware, and the collective knowledge of software developers across organizations has been based primarily on single processor platforms.