Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department of Computer Science

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Thursday, March 6, 2014

Transactional Memory Patent Awarded

Arrvindh Shriraman (PhD '11) and Faculty members Sandhya Dwarkadas and Michael L. Scott have been awarded a patent for their research in Transactional Memory.  From the patent award:

US patent #8,661,204, "Mechanism to Support Flexible Decoupled
Transactional Memory," by Arrvindh Shriraman, Sandhya Dwarkadas, and
Michael L. Scott, was awarded Feb. 25, 2014.  This patent is based on
work presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture
(ISCA) in June, 2008, and described in more detail in the Oct. 2010
issue of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Transactional memory allows a core of a multiprocessor to execute a
block of instructions (a "transaction") speculatively, as an indivisible
unit from the perspective of all other cores.  The patented mechanism
makes visible the conflicts between transactions on different cores, so
that software (rather than hardware) can choose which to commit and
which to abort.

 

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