This talk will present Transactional Memory (TM), a programming abstraction for simplifying the development of concurrent applications, both in multi-threaded programs running on multi-core processors as well as in distributed cloud infrastructures.

TM allows programmers to declare which parts of a program need to run atomically (i.e., as indivisible steps), while a generic implementation involving compilers, runtime libraries, middleware, and hardware support for TM takes care of ensuring this atomicity at runtime. The presenter will give an overview of recent advances (e.g., integration of hardware TM in Intel and IBM CPUs), standardization efforts (e.g., for C++), and open-source tools providing support for TM (e.g., GCC)