An embedded domain specific language for distributed memory transactions in Java

Transactional memory is an abstraction where concurrent memory accesses are grouped into atomic transactions, similar to database transactions. There are many advantages in using this model instead of conventional ones, such as ease of programming: programmers simply mark code where race conditions may occur and the transactional system takes care to ensure the correctness of the results. This model has proven to be promising for Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) machines, however few studies in this area are focused on distributed architectures. These architectures are extremely important nowadays, as they compose a large portion of high performance computing platforms, and because of the trend of more and more computing devices communicating with each other. The main objective of this paper is to propose a domain specific language embedded in Java, for implementing memory transactions that can involve local and distributed objects on a network. This goal was approached both in the language level, allowing the programmer to define composable transactional actions, and in transactional system level, supporting the implementation of the language's abstractions. To validate our model, preliminary measurements of a prototype implementation of the system described here are presented.