Dear GCC-Developers,
my name is Martin Schindewolf and I am a student about to start his
PhD. Currently, my funding comes from HiPEAC, a European Network that
has been encouraging and funding GCC related projects in the past.
Please have a look at the home page for details about HiPEAC[1] and
the compilation platform[2].
The goal of my particular project is to come up with a robust and stable
implementation of transactional memory support for GCC. We plan to
release the implementation as a development branch of the GCC under the
GPL. Hopefully, other people interested in TM research will be inspired
and base their research on it.
On the other hand, our work should help to facilitate the use of TM
among programmers and we hope to see some real applications using TM.
For now our major design goals are to be orthogonal to other parallel
programming models (such as OpenMP), to support exception handling and
to concentrate on the basic STM features (such as the closed nesting of
transactions). We are open for discussion on the features and hoping to
get some recommendations which STMs you would like to see supported. Our
initial pick is the tinySTM because it is released under the GPL and
the maintaining people are willing to answer to our questions. Of course
we want to support other STM implementations as well so that the user
may choose from different STMs.
Since a lot of ongoing work in GCC may have a great effect on our
implementation, we are interested in particular feedback from the
developers of the Tuple and the GOMP 3.0 branches. Thank you very much
for getting back to us. Our initial design document is available [3].
Regards,
Martin Schindewolf
[1] http://www.hipeac.net/
[2] http://www.hipeac.net/node/2169
[3] http://www.hipeac.net/node/2419
