Beautiful concurrency

I had another interesting read yesterday:

Beautiful concurrency by Simon Peyton Jones of Microsoft Research

Modern computers have more than one CPU. In order to make good use of multiple CPUs, parallel programs must be written. A problem arises when a resource must not be used by multiple threads at the same time. This is conventionally solved by using locking (e.g. using synchronized in Java, or lock in C#).

The paper describes Software Transactional Memory, a new approach to programming shared-memory parallel processors in a more modular way.