The 2nd Workshop on the Theory of Transactional Memory is a forum to foster exchanges, discussions, and disseminations among researchers of speculative solutions for concurrent programming. The objective is to discuss new theoretical challenges and recent achievements in the context of transactional computing.

The transactional memory abstraction appears promising for democratizing concurrent programming. Its success lies in producing code that is extensible as atomicity is preserved under composition of transactions. This new abstraction raises several challenges such as the compliance of transactions with alternative synchronization techniques of legacy code and dedicated consistency models that favor concurrency.

As a major goal of the workshop is to explore new directions and approaches for reasoning about transactional memory, we especially encourage the submission of ongoing work, as well as position papers and case studies of existing verification projects.

The Transaction Memory paradigm is argued to be as easy to use as coarse-grained locking, and nearly as efficient on multi-core systems as hand-crafted, fine-grained locking. It is thus not surprising to see a large body of work dedicated to implementing the paradigm and exploring its limitations. Very little work has however been devoted to explore its theoretical ramifications. The 1st Workshop on Theory of Transactional Memory is devoted to discussing those ramifications. It is organized on the 22nd of September, in conjunction with DISC 2009 (http://disc2009.gsyc.es/).

Ravi S., Gramoli V., Luchangco V. (2010) Transactional Memory, linking Theory and Practice. ACM Sigact News 41(4):107-111.

Gramoli, V. (2009) What Theory for Transactional Memory? ACM Sigact News - Distributed Computing Column 40(4):79-81.