A significant road block to TM research is the lack of workloads designed with TM in mind. The WTW is being held as an effort to resolve this road block. We intend this to be a workshop in the best sense of the word, by allocating as much time to discussion as presentation, with an intended goal of charting a path toward developing a set of TM workloads that are shared within the TM community.

Panel Slides: Adl-Tabatabai , Harris , Kuszmaul , Scott , Wood

Date: Saturday, June 10th, 2006

Time: 1:00pm - 5:30pm

Location: Marriott Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada (co-located with PLDI /ACM Transact )

Thanks to industrial sponsors, we don't need to charge a registration fee, but please "register" by sending an email to wtw@cs.uiuc.edu with name and affiliation, so that we can print badges and make the right number of copies of the proceedings (as well as have enough food for the break).

Keynote: “Taking Transactions Mainstream: Social Failure Modes and Recovery” (1:00pm - 2:00pm)

Don Box, Microsoft

Abstract: The last half of the 1990's saw a concerted effort to take transactions out of the database and shove them into mass-market programming environments. Both Microsoft and Sun heralded their respective offerings (MTS and EJB) as "the answer." However, by the end of the decade, it was no longer clear that the right question was being asked nor that the average developer liked the answer they were getting all that much. This talk looks at the successes and failures of this "transactions + objects" wave and tries to identify a few key areas we need to get right in the "transactions + memory" wave that is looming on the horizon.

Bio: Don Box is one of the original four developers of SOAP, a basic messaging layer for web services. Don Box is currently a programmer with a blossoming advertising business in the Pacific Northwest that also sells operating systems and applications. Don's first assignment with the firm was to work on Microsoft's implementation of SOAP, Windows Communication Foundation (a.k.a. Indigo). Don's current assignment is focused on making it more efficient for people to make their computers do what they want. Don is also a series editor with Addison Wesley where he's written four books in the area of software integration.

Session I: 2:00pm - 3:00pm

Parallelizing SPECjbb2000 with Transactional Memory

JaeWoong Chung, Chi Cao Minh, Brian D. Carlstrom, Christos Kozyrakis, Stanford

Digital CAD Tools as Transactional Memory Workloads

Satnam Singh, Microsoft

Using Transactions in Delaunay Mesh Generation

Milind Kulkarni, L. Paul Chew and Keshav Pingali, Cornell

Break: 3:00pm - 3:30 pm

Session II: 3:30pm - 4:30pm

Concurrent Cache-Oblivious B-Trees Using Transactional Memory

Bradley Kuszmaul and Jim Sukha, MIT

The Linux Kernel: A Challenging Workload for Transactional Memory

Hany E. Ramadan, Christopher J. Rossbach and Emmett Witchel, University of Texas at Austin

Early Release: Friend or Foe?

Travis Skare and Christos Kozyrakis, Stanford

Panel Session: Toward Transactional Memory Workloads

4:30pm - 5:30pm

Many of the challenges of architecting Transactional Memory systems derive from a lack of understanding how programmers will use such systems. In this respect, research in Transactional Memory systems would be greatly facilitated by the public availability of a set of workloads that were designed with transactional memory in mind. Developing a collection of workloads could be achieved through a community effort, but a number of challenges remain in realizing this goal.

Panelists:

Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabi, Intel

Tim Harris, Microsoft

Bradley Kuszmaul, MIT

Michael Scott, Rochester

David Wood, Wisconsin

Krste Asanovic MIT

Maurice Herlihy, Brown

Jim Johnson, Microsoft

James Larus, Microsoft

Charles Leiserson, MIT

Ravi Rajwar, Intel

Craig Zilles, UIUC

http://odin.cs.uiuc.edu/WTW

call for papers: http://odin.cs.uiuc.edu/WTW/call.html