Exploiting HTM for Improved C++ Smart Pointers
-----------------------------------
          
This seminar is part of the "EBSIS - Event Based Systems in Iasi" 
Twinning project.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 
research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 692178.
-----------------------------------
          
ABSTRACT
-----------------------------------
The most popular programming languages, such as C++ or Java, have 
libraries and data structures designed to automatically address 
concurrency hazards in order to run on multiple threads. This trend has 
also been adopted in the memory management domain. However, automatic 
concurrent memory management also comes at a price, leading sometimes to 
noticeable overhead. We experiment with C++ smart pointers and their 
automatic memory-management technique based on reference counting. More 
precisely, we study how we can use hardware transactional memory (HTM) 
to avoid costly and sometimes unnecessary atomic operations. This talk 
presents details concerning the algorithm and the implementation of 
transactional smart pointers. We then introduce specific use cases that 
could particularly benefit from transactional pointers, such as 
concurrent data structures traversal.
          
SPEAKER(S)
-----------------------------------
CARPEN-AMARIE Maria, PhD
University of Neuchatel
Elvetia
-----------------------------------
Maria Carpen-Amarie recently obtained her PhD degree at 
University of Neuchatel, Switzerland. 
She received her Master's degree in Computer Science 
from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL),
Switzerland. 
Her research interests include concurrent systems, 
managed runtime environments, memory management 
mechanisms.
-----------------------------------