Patent Issued for Transactional Memory Compatibility Management

By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Journal of Engineering -- Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, WA) has been issued patent number 8266604, according to news reporting originating out of Alexandria, Virginia, by VerticalNews editors.

The patent's inventors are Groff, Dana (Sammamish, WA); Levanoni, Yosseff (Redmond, WA); Toub, Stephen (Seattle, WA); Magruder, Michael McKenzie (Carnation, WA); Zhu, Weirong (Kirkland, WA); Harris, Timothy Lawrence (Cambridge, GB); Dern, Christopher William (Kirkland, WA); Duffy, John Joseph (Renton, WA); Detlefs, David (Issaquah, WA); Abadi, Martin (Palo Alto, CA); Sodhi, Sukhdeep Singh (Redmond, WA); Zhang, Lingli (Redmond, WA); Dadiomov, Alexander (Redmond, WA); Grover, Vinod (Mercer Island, WA).

This patent was filed on January 26, 2009 and was cleared and issued on September 11, 2012.

From the background information supplied by the inventors, news correspondents obtained the following quote: "Sometimes a computational problem can be divided into pieces in a way that allows a system to work on more than one piece at a time. For example, concurrent computing simultaneously carries out multiple computing tasks, such as multiple threads or multiple processes. Similarly, parallel computing systems carry out multiple instructions simultaneously. Parallel computing may be viewed as an example of concurrent computing, and the distinction between them is not critical here.

"Various tools and techniques are used to coordinate the pieces of a divided computational problem. In particular, transactional memory may be used to control access to shared memory. Transactional memory supports a way to abstractly express what memory operations operate with a transactional behavior. In some transactional memory implementations, code in a transaction executes a series of reads and writes to shared memory which appear from outside the transaction to happen atomically. That is, either all of the code in a transaction completes (transaction succeeded), or else work done by the code before the transaction fails is undone, so the view from outside the transaction is that none of the code completed (transaction failed).

"In some situations, code is initially designed and written to run on a transactional memory system, while in other situations the possibility of running particular code on a transactional memory implementation arises after that code has already been designed and written. Some code is also less amenable to transactional execution than other code. For example, it may be difficult or impossible to undo work done by code that transmits data over a network or code that changes the state of a peripheral device."

Supplementing the background information on this patent, VerticalNews reporters also obtained the inventors' summary information for this patent: "To help make effective use of transactional memory, transactional memory compatibility type attributes are associated with intermediate language code. In some embodiments, an attribute may specify, for example, that a given portion of intermediate language code must be run within a transaction, or that the code must not be run within a transaction, or that the code may be run within a transaction but can also be run without using a transaction. The attributes can be automatically generated for a runtime environment, such as a Microsoft .NET runtime or a Mono runtime, on a system that includes transactional memory, while generating the intermediate language code from annotated source code (.NET is a mark of Microsoft Corporation, and Mono is a mark of Novell, Inc.). Default rules may also be used to generate attributes, e.g., by associating a must-not-be-in-transaction attribute with code such as kernel calls that have effects beyond the control of the runtime environment.

"A runtime environment may respond to transactional memory compatibility attributes in various ways. For example, the runtime may suppress an ambient transaction, may marshal data for read-only use by a transaction suppressed region, and/or may dynamically redirect control from an invocation based on whether the invocation occurs within a transaction. The attributes may also be used to statically and/or dynamically check for incompatibility between intermediate language code and a transactional memory implementation.

"The examples given are merely illustrative. This Summary is not intended to identify key features or essential features of the claimed subject matter, nor is it intended to be used to limit the scope of the claimed subject matter. Rather, this Summary is provided to introduce - in a simplified form--some concepts that are further described below in the Detailed Description. The innovation is defined with claims, and to the extent this Summary conflicts with the claims, the claims should prevail."

For the URL and additional information on this patent, see: Groff, Dana; Levanoni, Yosseff; Toub, Stephen; Magruder, Michael McKenzie; Zhu, Weirong; Harris, Timothy Lawrence; Dern, Christopher William; Duffy, John Joseph; Detlefs, David; Abadi, Martin; Sodhi, Sukhdeep Singh; Zhang, Lingli; Dadiomov, Alexander; Grover, Vinod. Transactional Memory Compatibility Management. U.S. Patent Number 8266604, filed January 26, 2009, and issued September 11, 2012. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=12&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=568&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=20120911.PD.&OS=ISD/20120911&RS=ISD/20120911

Keywords for this news article include: Microsoft Corporation.

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