software
transactional
memory
why is it only a research toy?

developed the chip simulator for the Cyclops processor and worked on system software for the Blue Gene/C machine. Since 2003, he has been leading the Compilers team in the PERCS project (IBM’s entry in the DARPA HPCS program). As part of this effort he is leading the development of the IBM xlUPC compiler and the Continuous Program Optimization project. He is also the project lead for transactional memory evaluation in IBM Research. He obtained an M.S. in computer engineering from Technical University Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 1991, M.S. in computer science from West Virginia University in 1995, and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000. COLIN BLUNDELL is a fifth-year graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is pursuing his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Milo Martin. His primary reseach interests are in multiprocessor performance and programmability, including memory consistency, cache coherence protocols, and hardware mechanisms for enabling optimistic concurrency. HAROLD “TREY” CAIN is a research staff member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, where he conducts research on the microarchitecture and memory system of highly multithreaded processors. He has coauthored more than 20 publications in the areas of multiprocessor memory system design, processor microarchitecture, simulation methodology, and the characterization of commercial server applications. Cain holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, and a B.S. from the College of William and Mary. His graduate research was selected as a 2004 “Top Pick” in computer architecture by IEEE Micro. His accent comes from the hills of eastern Kentucky. MAGED M. MICHAEL is a research staff member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. He received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester. His research interests are primarily in concurrent algorithms, concurrent programming, and concurrent memory management. He is

the designer of well-known concurrent algorithms, including lock-free malloc, hazard pointers, and nonblocking algorithms for common data structures. His algorithms are used in commercial standard libraries, runtime systems, middle-ware, and realtime systems. PENG WU is a research staff member at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center and a member of the programming models and tools for scalable systems group. Her work has been centered around building a high-performance and high-productivity programming environment. Her past work on simdization has resulted in the first product release of an XL compiler with simdization capability and more than a dozen patents. More recently, she has been working on compiler and language supports for transactional memory and thread-level speculation. She received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001. STEFANIE CHIRAS is a manager in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, leading a team responsible for technology and mainframe test. Prior to this role she was a research staff member in IBM Research, managing a team developing next-generation memory systems and incorporating emerging memory technologies. She joined IBM Research in 2001 as part of the Back End of Line Reliability team, after a postdoctoral position at Princeton University in the Princeton Materials Institute. She holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in materials science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. SIDDHARTHA CHATTERJEE is director of the Austin Research Laboratory, one of IBM’s eight worldwide research laboratories. He also serves as the research area strategist for systems architecture. He has held technical, managerial, executive, strategy, and staff positions during his time in the IBM Research Division. Most recently, he was senior manager of the Systems Solutions and Architecture group at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. Earlier, he was the leader of the Blue Gene performance team. Chatterjee received a B. Tech. in electronics and electrical communications engineering in 1985 from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and Ph.D. in computer science in 1991 from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining IBM Research, he was a visiting scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science (RIACS) in Mountain View, California, from 1991 through 1994, and was assistant and associate professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1994 through 2001. He is currently an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. © 2008 ACM 1542-7730 /08/0900 $5.00