Paper Info
Title
An effective hybrid transactional memory system with strong isolation guarantees
Abstract
We propose signature-accelerated transactional memory (SigTM), ahybrid TM system that reduces the overhead of software transactions. SigTM uses hardware signatures to track the read-set and write-set forpending transactions and perform conflict detection between concurrent threads. All other transactional functionality, including dataversioning, is implemented in software. Unlike previously proposed hybrid TM systems, SigTM requires no modifications to the hardware caches, which reduces hardware cost and simplifies support for nested transactions and multithreaded processor cores. SigTM is also the first hybrid TM system to provide strong isolation guarantees between transactional blocks and non-transactional accesses without additional read and write barriers in non-transactional code. Using a set of parallel programs that make frequent use of coarse-grain transactions, we show that SigTM accelerates software transactions by 30% to 280%. For certain workloads, SigTM can match the performance of a full-featured hardware TM system, while for workloads with large read-sets it can be up to two times slower. Overall, we show that SigTM combines the performance characteristics and strong isolation guarantees of hardware TM implementations with the low cost and flexibility of software TM systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1145/1250662.1250673
Proceedings of the 40th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture
Keywords
Field
DocType
design,parallel programming,performance,nested transaction,transactional memory
Software transactional memory,Computer science,Parallel computing,Real-time computing,Thread (computing),Implementation,Transactional memory,Software,Nested transaction,Transactional leadership,Multi-core processor,Operating system
Conference
Volume
Issue
ISSN
35
2
0163-5964
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
149
6.71
18
Authors
8
Search Limit
100149
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chi Cao Minh1116061.54
Martin Trautmann21808.55
Jaewoong Chung399352.00
Austen Mcdonald449936.78
Nathan Bronson540817.79
Jared Casper682434.12
Christos Kozyrakis75817355.99
Kunle Olukotun84532373.50