Software Transactional Memory

I promised in an earlier post to discuss software transactional memory, so today I've decided to present a paper written by Andrew Seniuk and me for Lisa Higham's distributed algorithms course. The contains an overview description of STM, discusses implementation approaches of a few current systems, provides proofs of several properties of the DSTM implementation, and highlights possible pitfalls that can occur in transactional code. During the time Andrew and I were working on the paper, there was a lot of excitement in the blogosphere of the potential of STM, and I think it is important to highlight the problems that will be encountered when use of software transactional memory gets more widespread - both to help people avoid them, and to deflate some of the "silver bullet" hype that I think STM has received. Enough rambling, here's the link to the paper:

http://vsedach.googlepages.com/stm561.pdf