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SUMMARY:Serializability Enforcement for Concurrent ML - Suresh Jagannathan
  - Purdue University\, USA
DTSTART:20091104T141500Z
DTEND:20091104T151500Z
UID:TALK19191@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Mateja Jamnik
DESCRIPTION:There has been much recent interest in exploring higher-level\
 nconcurrency control abstractions such as software transactional\nmemory (
 STM) to alleviate the complexity of reasoning about\ninteractions among co
 ncurrent threads of control.  Isolation and\natomicity are the two critica
 l properties provided by an STM that\nguarantee serializability of concurr
 ent actions.  Isolation\nensures that transactions execute without interfe
 rence from\neffects performed by other transactions\, and atomicity guaran
 tees\nthat intermediate effects performed by a transaction are not seen\nb
 y other concurrently executing transactions.\n\nWhile STM has been mostly 
 studied in the context of shared-memory\nconcurrency\, the atomicity and i
 solation properties it provides can\nbenefit message-passing systems as we
 ll.  In this talk\, we explore the\nintegration of these features into Con
 current ML\, a dialect of ML that\nsupports first-class synchronous messag
 e-based communication events.\nCentral to our design is the introduction o
 f an isolate\, a combinator\nthat ensures its argument events\, which may 
 be arbitrarily complex\,\nexecute concurrently with strong isolation guara
 ntees.  In conjunction\nwith an orthogonal combinator that provides atomic
 ity\, we achieve a\nprogramming model that fully integrates transactional 
 support into a\nCML-style concurrency model\, resulting in improved expres
 sivity and\nsafety.  We also present an overview of an implementation in M
 Lton\, a\nwhole-program optimizing compiler for ML.\n
LOCATION:Lecture Theatre 1\, Computer Laboratory
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