Automatic contention detection and amelioration for data-intensive operations

To take full advantage of the parallelism offered by a multi-core machine, one must write parallel code. Writing parallel code is difficult. Even when one writes correct code, there are numerous performance pitfalls. For example, an unrecognized data hotspot could mean that all threads effectively serialize their access to the hotspot, and throughput is dramatically reduced. Previous work has demonstrated that database operations suffer from such hotspots when naively implemented to run in parallel on a multi-core processor.