Eliminating Global Locks in Ruby through Hardware Transactional Memory

I saw the first author of this paper present this work in my building a month ago. Myself and others were impressed with both their results, and the rigor in their analysis. They experiment on multiple hardware platforms, and even compare against other VMs. In short, this is what good systems research looks like.

Note that this page links to both the full paper and the slides from their conference talk. I should also disclose that I also work for IBM Research, so I may have some bias in liking this paper.