Title
Energy-Efficient and High-Performance Lock Speculation Hardware for Embedded Multicore Systems
Abstract
Embedded systems are becoming increasingly common in everyday life and like their general-purpose counterparts, they have shifted towards shared memory multicore architectures. However, they are much more resource constrained, and as they often run on batteries, energy efficiency becomes critically important. In such systems, achieving high concurrency is a key demand for delivering satisfactory performance at low energy cost. In order to achieve this high concurrency, consistency across the shared memory hierarchy must be accomplished in a cost-effective manner in terms of performance, energy, and implementation complexity. In this article, we propose Embedded-Spec, a hardware solution for supporting transparent lock speculation, without the requirement for special supporting instructions. Using this approach, we evaluate the energy consumption and performance of a suite of benchmarks, exploring a range of contention management and retry policies. We conclude that for resource-constrained platforms, lock speculation can provide real benefits in terms of improved concurrency and energy efficiency, as long as the underlying hardware support is carefully configured.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1145/2700097
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Design,Performance,Transactional memory,energy-efficiency,low-power,lock elision,lock removal
Journal
14
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1539-9087
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.41
16
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dimitra Papagiannopoulou1263.62
Giuseppe Capodanno230.41
Tali Moreshet3989.81
Maurice Herlihy48623920.94
R. Iris Bahar587884.31