Advanced Synchronization & Transactional Memory

This lecture covers advanced synchronization techniques and transactional memory. It starts with a refresher on synchronization operations and the need for atomic operations in memory. The lecture then delves into solutions like atomic Read-Modify-Write operations and Test&Set. It discusses better lock implementations, LL-SC, and specialized hardware for queue locks. The concept of ticket locks and array-based queue locks is explained, along with their properties and variants. The lecture also explores list-based queue locks like MCS, highlighting their properties and performance. It concludes with a discussion on hardware support for queue locks, microbenchmark analysis, and the performance of different lock implementations.