Person

Michal Kapalka

This person is no longer with EPFL

Related publications (12)

Theory of Transactional Memory

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for concurrent programming, in which threads of an application communicate, and synchronize their actions, via inmemory transactions. Each transaction can perform any number of operations on shared data, an ...

EPFL2010

Transactions in the Jungle

Rachid Guerraoui, Vasu Singh, Michal Kapalka

Transactional memory (TM) has shown potential to simplify the task of writing concurrent programs. Inspired by classical work on databases, formal definitions of the semantics of TM executions have been proposed. Many of these definitions assumed that acce ...

Acm Order Department2010

Leveraging Parallel Nesting in Transactional Memory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka, Aleksandar Dragojevic

Exploiting the emerging reality of affordable multi-core architectures goes through providing programmers with simple abstractions that would enable them to easily turn their sequential programs into concurrent ones that expose as much parallelism as possi ...

ACM2010

The Semantics of Progress in Lock-Based Transactional Memory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for concurrent programming. Whereas the number of TM implementations is growing, however, little research has been conducted to precisely define TM semantics, especially their progress guarantees. This pape ...

ACM2009

The Theory of Transactional Memory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for concurrent programming. This paper is an overview of our recent work on defining a theory of TM. We first present a correctness condition of a TM, ensured by most existing TM implementations. Then, we d ...

2009

Stretching Transactional Memory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka, Aleksandar Dragojevic

Transactional memory (TM) is an appealing abstraction for programming multi-core systems. Potential target applications for TM, such as business software and video games, are likely to involve complex data structures and large transactions, requiring speci ...

2009

Transactional Memory: Glimmer of a Theory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for concurrent programming. This paper is an overview of our recent theoretical work on defining a theory of TM. We first recall some TM correctness properties and then overview results on the inherent powe ...

Springer2009

On the Correctness of Transactional Memory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

Transactional memory (TM) is perceived as an appealing alternative to critical sections for general purpose concurrent programming. Despite the large amount of recent work on TM implementations, however, very little effort has been devoted to precisely def ...

2008

On Obstruction-Free Transactions

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

This paper studies obstruction-free software transactional memory systems (OFTMs). These systems are appealing, for they combine the atomicity property of transactions with a liveness property that ensures the commitment of every transaction that eventuall ...

ACM2008

STMBench7: A Benchmark for Software Transactional Memory

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

Software transactional memory (STM) is a promising technique for controlling concurrency in modern multi-processor architectures. STM aims to be more scalable than explicit coarse-grained locking and easier to use than fine-grained locking. However, STM im ...

2007

The Weakest Failure Detectors to Boost Obstruction-Freedom

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

It is considered good practice in concurrent computing to devise shared object implementations that ensure a minimal obstruction-free progress property and delegate the task of boosting liveness to independent generic oracles called contention managers. Th ...

2008

The Weakest Failure Detectors to Boost Obstruction-Freedom

Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka

This paper determines necessary and sufficient conditions to implement wait-free and non-blocking contention managers in a shared memory system. The necessary conditions hold even when universal objects (like compare-and-swap) or random oracles are availab ...

2006