Channels ▼   Parallel Computing's "Fundamental" Change:
Transactional Memory  Two special interest groups within the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have highlighted the
publication of a pair of research papers that "fundamentally
changed" parallel computing in both theory and practice.  The
Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory
(SIGACT) and the Special Interest Group on Operating Systems
(SIGOPS) have recognized the 1993 work of Maurice Herlihy and J.
Eliot B. Moss, who introduced transactional memory as a new
abstraction for multiprocessor architecture that greatly
simplifies programming of concurrent computer systems.  The
groups also highlighted and pinpointed the 1995 work of Nir
Shavit and Dan Touitou, who built on the hardware-based
transactional synchronization methods of Herlihy and Moss,
offering a software method for supporting the transactional
memory abstraction used on parallel computing operations.  This
week the ACM celebrates the work of all four authors in the