Title
Study of Hardware Transactional Memory Characteristics and Serialization Policies on Haswell
Abstract
We evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of Intel extensions to HTM - TSX.We described features that are likely to yield performance gains when using TSX.We explored with the aid of a new tool called htm-pBuilder the performance of TSX.We introduced a efficient policy for guaranteeing forward progress on top of TSX.We explored various fall-back policy tunings and transaction properties of TSX. This paper presents an extensive performance study of the implementation of Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) in the Haswell generation of Intel x86 core processors. It evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of this new architecture by exploring several dimensions in the space of Transactional Memory (TM) application characteristics using the Eigenbench¿(Hong et¿al., 2010 1) and the CLOMP-TM¿(Schindewolf et¿al., 2012 2), benchmarks. This paper also introduces a new tool, called htm-pBuilder that tailors fallback policies and allows independent exploration of its parameters.This detailed performance study provides insights on the constraints imposed by the Intel's Transaction Synchronization Extension (Intel's TSX) and introduces a simple, but efficient policy for guaranteeing forward progress on top of the best-effort Intel's HTM which was critical to achieving performance. The evaluation also shows that there are a number of potential improvements for designers of TM applications and software systems that use Intel's TM and provides recommendations to extract maximum benefit from the current TM support available in Haswell.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1016/j.parco.2015.12.002
Parallel Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
Programming techniques,Concurrent programming,Transactional memory
x86,Synchronization,Serialization,Computer science,Parallel computing,Transactional memory,Software system,Concurrent computing,Database transaction,Strengths and weaknesses,Operating system
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
54
C
0167-8191
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.38
16
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Marcio Machado Pereira1174.52
Matthew Gaudet21546.76
José Nelson Amaral3451.41
Guido Araujo43913.69