Transactional memory

About: Transactional memory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2365 publications have been published within this topic receiving 60818 citations.

Improving Signatures by Locality Exploitation for Transactional Memory

Abstract: Writing multithreaded programs is a fairly complex task that poses a major obstacle to exploit multicore processors. Transactional Memory (TM) emerges as an alternative to the conventional multithreaded programming to ease the writing of concurrent programs. Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) implements most of the required mechanisms of TM at the core level, e.g. conflict detection. Signatures are designed to support the detection of conflicts amongst concurrent transactions, and are usually implemented as per-thread Bloom filters in HTM. Basically, signatures use fixed hardware to summarize an unbounded amount of read and write memory addresses at the cost of false conflicts (detection of non-existing conflicts). In this paper, a novel signature design that exploit locality is proposed to reduce the number of false conflicts. We show how that reduction translates into a performance improvement in the execution of concurrent transactions. Our signatures are based on address mappings of the hash functions that reduce the number of bits inserted in the filter for those addresses nearby located. This is specially favorable for large transactions, that usually exhibit some amount of spatial locality. Furthermore, the implementation do not require extra hardware. Our proposal was experimentally evaluated using the Wisconsin GEMS simulator and all codes from the STAMP benchmark suite. Results show a significant performance improvement in many cases, specially for those codes with long-running, large-data transactions.

Handling operating system (os) transitions in an unbounded transactional memory (utm) mode

Abstract: In one embodiment, the present invention includes a method for receiving control in a kernel mode via a ring transition from a user thread during execution of an unbounded transactional memory (UTM) transaction, updating a state of a transaction status register (TSR) associated with the user thread and storing the TSR with a context of the user thread, and later restoring the context during a transition from the kernel mode to the user thread. In this way, the UTM transaction may continue on resumption of the user thread. Other embodiments are described and claimed.

System enabling transactional memory and prediction-based transaction execution method

Abstract: This invention provides a system enabling Transactional Memory with overflow prediction mechanism, comprising: prediction unit for predicting the mode for the next execution of a transaction based on the final status of the previous execution of the transaction; execution unit for executing the transaction in the execution mode predicted by the prediction unit, wherein the execution mode comprises overflow mode and non-overflow made. According to this invention, before a transaction is executed, it is predicted whether or not the transaction will overflow, and therefore, the execution of the transaction which is necessary to determine whether or not an overflow will occur is saved and the system performance can be improved.

Implementing and evaluating nested parallel transactions in software transactional memory

Abstract: Transactional Memory (TM) is a promising technique that simplifies parallel programming for shared-memory applications. To date, most TM systems have been designed to efficiently support single-level parallelism. To achieve widespread use and maximize performance gains, TM must support nested parallelism available in many applications and supported by several programming models.We present NesTM, a software TM (STM) system that supports closed-nested parallel transactions. NesTM is based on a high-performance, blocking STM that uses eager version management and word-granularity conflict detection. Its algorithm targets the state and runtime overheads of nested parallel transactions. We also describe several subtle correctness issues in supporting nested parallel transactions in NesTM and discuss their performance impact.Through our evaluation, we quantitatively analyze the performance of NesTM using STAMP applications and microbenchmarks based on concurrent data structures. First, we show that the performance overhead of NesTM is reasonable when single-level parallelism is used. Second, we quantify the incremental overhead of NesTM when the parallelism is exploited in deeper nesting levels and draw conclusions that can be useful in designing a nesting-aware TM runtime environment. Finally, we demonstrate a use-case where nested parallelism improves the performance of a transactional microbenchmark.