A new theoretical framework for nesting of memory transactions has been developed.

nesttr.jpg In the recent years software transactional memory (STM) has garnered significant interest as an elegant alternative for developing concurrent code. Software transactions are units of execution in memory which enable concurrent threads to execute seamlessly. Traditionally locks have been used for developing parallel programs. But programming with locks has many disadvantages such as deadlocks, priority inversion etc. These disadvantages makes it difficult to build scalable software systems. mportantly, lock based software components are difficult to compose i.e. build larger software systems using simpler software components. Software transactions address many of the shortcomings of lock based systems. Specifically, software transactions provide a very promising approach for composing software components.

Dr.Sathya Peri of IIT Patna and Prof. K.Vidyasankar of Memorial University, St John's, Canada developed a new theoretical framework for building efficient STM systems that support transactional nesting. These results were published in 12th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN) held at Bangalore, India in January 2011 under the title "Correctness of Concurrent Executions of Closed Nested Transactions in Transactional Memory Systems".