Software transactional memory

In computer science, software transactional memory (STM) is a concurrency control mechanism analogous to database transactions for controlling access to shared memory in concurrent computing. It is an alternative to lock-based synchronization. STM is a strategy implemented in software, rather than as a hardware component. A transaction in this context occurs when a piece of code executes a series of reads and writes to shared memory. These reads and writes logically occur at a single instant in time; intermediate states are not visible to other (successful) transactions. The idea of providing hardware support for transactions originated in a 1986 paper by Tom Knight.[1] The idea was popularized by Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss.[2] In 1995 Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou extended this idea to software-only transactional memory (STM).[3] Since 2005, STM has been the focus of intense research[4] and support for practical implementations is growing.