Google Tech Talks June 14, 2008 ABSTRACT As power restrictions have limited performance advances in a single core, new generations of processors are providing a steadily increasing number of cores on a single die. Effectively utilizing such processors requires that programmers write concurrent, scalable programs that typically consist of multiple threads of execution. To communicate between threads, programmers rely on lock-based synchronization to control concurrent access to shared data. Locks are notoriously difficult to use: they do not compose well, they can lead to deadlock, and they must used in fine-grain manner to achieve good scalability. Transactional memory (TM) offers a promising alternative that avoids many of the hazards of locks. At a semantic level, TM provides stronger guarantees of atomicity and isolation across multiple threads. At an implementation level, TM enables greater scalability via optimistic concurrency techniques. In this talk, I will provide a survey...