Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Nonblocking implementations of software transactional memory (STM) typically impose an extra level of indirection when accessing an object; some researchers have claimed that the cost of this indirection outweighs the semantic advantages of nonblocking progress guarantees. We consider this claim in the context of a simple hardware assist, alert-on-update (AOU), which allows a thread to request immediate notification if specified line(s) are replaced or invalidated in its cache. We show that even a single AOU line allows us to construct a simple, nonblocking STM system without extra indirection. At the same time, we observe that per-load validation operations, required for intra-object consistency in both the new system and in lock-based (blocking) STM, at least partially negate the resulting performance gain. Moreover, inter-object consistency checks, also required in both kinds of systems, remain the dominant cost for transactions that access many objects. We therefore present a second nonblocking STM system that uses multiple AOU lines (one per accessed object) to eliminate validation overhead entirely, resulting in a nonblocking, zero-indirection STM system that outperforms competing systems by as much as a factor of 2. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2007 | 10.1145/1248377.1248414 | SPAA |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
nonblocking progress guarantee,dominant cost,single aou line,multiple aou line,accessed object,extra indirection,new system,zero-indirection stm system,nonblocking transaction,nonblocking stm system,extra level,software transactional memory,processor architecture | Software transactional memory,Indirection,Cache,Lock (computer science),Computer science,Parallel computing,Computer network,Thread (computing),Implementation,Distributed computing | Conference |
Citations | PageRank | References |
15 | 1.17 | 16 |
Authors | ||
5 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Michael F. Spear | 1 | 366 | 17.06 |
| Arrvindh Shriraman | 2 | 292 | 17.70 |
| Luke Dalessandro | 3 | 357 | 16.67 |
| Sandhya Dwarkadas | 4 | 3504 | 257.31 |
| Michael L. Scott | 5 | 2843 | 248.01 |