Paper Info
Title
ASF: AMD64 Extension for Lock-Free Data Structures and Transactional Memory
Abstract
Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) is an AMD64 hardware extension for lock-free data structures and transactional memory. It provides a speculative region that atomically executes speculative accesses in the region. Five new instructions are added to demarcate the region, use speculative accesses selectively, and control the speculative hardware context. Programmers can use speculative regions to build flexible multi-word atomic primitives with no additional software support by relying on the minimum guarantee of available ASF hardware resources for lock-free programming. Transactional programs with high-level TM language constructs can either be compiled directly to the ASF code or be linked to software TM systems that use ASF to accelerate transactional execution. In this paper we develop an out-of-order hardware design to implement ASF on a future AMD processor and evaluate it with an in-house simulator. The experimental results show that the combined use of the L1 cache and the LS unit is very helpful for the performance robustness of ASF-based lock free data structures, and that the selective use of speculative accesses enables transactional programs to scale with limited ASF hardware resources.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1109/MICRO.2010.40
IEEE Internet Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
amd64 extension,asf hardware resource,limited asf hardware resource,out-of-order hardware design,software support,combined use,software tm system,multiword atomic primitive,parallel programming,transactional program,storage management,lock free programming,data structures,speculative access,transactional memory,advanced synchronization facility,asf code,amd64 hardware extension,available asf hardware resource,amd processor,lock-free data structures,shared memory systems,speculative hardware context,lock-free programming,speculative region,lock free data structure,x86 architecture,in-house simulator,high level tm language,out of order,registers,hardware,programming
Data structure,Advanced Synchronization Facility,Computer science,Non-blocking algorithm,CPU cache,Language construct,Parallel computing,Transactional memory,Real-time computing,Software,Out-of-order execution,Operating system
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1072-4451
978-1-4244-9071-4
34
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.25
14
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jaewoong Chung199352.00
Luke Yen236112.30
Stephan Diestelhorst31227.17
Martin Pohlack41407.28
Michael Hohmuth533226.61
David Christie6534.46
Dan Grossman7121871.43