The javartm library allows Java/JVM users to use the "Restricted Transactional Memory" support available on some Intel CPUs. See here for more details.

In practice, this allows code running on the JVM to enjoy the benefits of Hardware Transactional Memory.

javartm is distributed under the terms of the GNU LGPLv3; see the COPYING and COPYING.LESSER files for more details.

As of this writing only CPUs based on the Intel Haswell architecture include the necessary hardware for RTM. See here for Intel's announcement, and here for the specifications.

Testing on other CPUs can be done using the Intel Software Development Emulator.

Building is done with ant, and requires the ant-cpptasks library.

Note that the ant-contrib-cpptasks package in Ubuntu is not installed to the right place, and ant will not be able to use it automatically. (To fix it, run sudo ln -sf /usr/share/java/ant-contrib-cpptasks.jar /usr/share/ant/lib/.)

Building also requires gcc >= 4.8, as this is the first version that adds support for the RTM instructions. It might be possible to use icc or others (feedback on this is appreciated).

As of this writing, there is no stable release of gcc 4.8 --- you will need to obtain or build your own.

I plan on providing binary packages of javartm soon. If they aren't up yet, feel free to mail me to ask for one.

The script scripts/runtest.sh runs a very simple test of javartm using the Intel SDE.

My name is Ivo Anjo and I am a PhD student working on Software Transactional Memory and Speculative Parallelization at the Software Engineering Group (ESW) at INESC-ID Lisboa.

Feel free to contact me about javartm at ivo.anjo@ist.utl.pt.

Some other software I am involved with and that might interest you is the Java Versioned Software Transactional Memory (JVSTM), a Java library implementing TM and the Fénix Framework, a framework for building web-applications combining transactional memory and persistence.

Thanks for reading this far! :)