research-article

A runtime system for software lock elision

Authors:

Tim HarrisAuthors Info & Claims

EuroSys '09: Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems

Pages 261 - 274

https://doi.org/10.1145/1519065.1519094

Published: 01 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The advent of multi-core processors means that exploiting parallelism is key to increasing the performance of programs. Many researchers have studied the use of atomic blocks as a way to simplify the construction of scalable parallel programs. However, there is a large body of existing lock-based code, and typically it is incorrect to simply replace lock-based critical sections with atomic blocks. Some problems include the need to do IO within critical sections; the use of primitives such as condition variables; and the sometime reliance on underlying lock properties such as fairness or priority inheritance.

In this paper we investigate an alternative: a software runtime system that allows threads to speculatively execute lock-based critical sections in parallel. Execution proceeds optimistically, dynamically detecting conflicts between accesses by concurrent threads. However, if there are frequent conflicts, or if there are attempts to perform operations that cannot be done speculatively, then execution can fall back to acquiring a lock. Conversely, implementations of atomic blocks must typically serialise all operations that cannot be performed speculatively.

Our runtime system has been designed with the requirements of systems code in mind: in particular it does not require that programs be written in type-safe languages, nor does it require any form of garbage collection. Furthermore, we never require a thread holding a lock to wait for a thread that has speculatively acquired it. This lets us retain any useful underlying properties of a given lock implementation, e.g. fairness or priority inheritance.

References

[1]

Martin Abadi, Andrew Birrell, Tim Harris, and Michael Isard. Semantics of transactional memory and automatic mutual exclusion. In POPL '08, 35th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 63--74, January 2008.

Digital Library

[2]

Martin Abadi, Tim Harris, and Mojtaba Mehrara. Transactional memory with strong atomicity using off-the-shelf memory protection hardware. In PPoPP '09, 14th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, February 2009.

Digital Library

[3]

Robert D. Blumofe, Christopher F. Joerg, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Charles E. Leiserson, Keith H. Randall, and Yuli Zhou. Cilk: An efficient multithreaded runtime system. Technical Report MIT-LCS-TM-548, 1995.

Digital Library

[4]

Hans-J. Boehm and Sarita V. Adve. Foundations of the C concurrency memory model. In PLDI '08: Proc. 2008 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 68--78, June 2008.

Digital Library

[5]

Chi Cao Minh, JaeWoong Chung, Christos Kozyrakis, and Kunle Olukotun. STAMP: Stanford transactional applications for multi-processing. In IISWC '08: Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization, pages 35--46, September 2008.

[6]

Dave Dice, Ori Shalev, and Nir Shavit. Transactional locking II. In DISC '06: Proc. 20th International Symposium on Distributed Computing, pages 194--208, September 2006.

Digital Library

[7]

Keir Fraser. Practical lock freedom. PhD thesis, Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, 2003. Also available as Technical Report UCAM-CL-TR-579.

[8]

Tim Harris and Keir Fraser. Language support for lightweight transactions. In OOPSLA '03: Proc. 18th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, pages 388--402, November 2003.

Digital Library

[9]

Tim Harris and Keir Fraser. Revocable locks for non-blocking programming. In PPoPP '05: Proc. 10th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, pages 72--82, June 2005.

Digital Library

[10]

Maurice Herlihy, Victor Luchangco, Mark Moir, and William N. Scherer, III. Software transactional memory for dynamic-sized data structures. In PODC '03: Proc. 22nd ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 92--101, July 2003.

Digital Library

[11]

Amos Israeli and Lihu Rappoport. Disjoint-access-parallel implementations of strong shared memory primitives. In PODC '94: Proc. 13th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pages 151--160, August 1994.

Digital Library

[12]

H. T. Kung and Philip L. Lehman. Concurrent manipulation of binary search trees. ACM Trans. Database Syst., 5 (3): 354--382, 1980.

Digital Library

[13]

Jim Larus and Ravi Rajwar. Transactional Memory. Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2007.

[14]

Virendra J. Marathe and Mark Moir. Toward high performance nonblocking software transactional memory. In PPoPP '08: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming, pages 227--236, New York, NY, USA, February 2008.

Digital Library

[15]

Virendra J. Marathe, Michael F. Spear, Christopher Heriot, Athul Acharya, David Eisenstat, William N. Scherer, III, and Michael L. Scott. Lowering the overhead of software transactional memory. Technical Report TR 893, Computer Science Department, University of Rochester, March 2006.

[16]

Vijay Menon, Steven Balensiefer, Tatiana Shpeisman, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Richard Hudson, Bratin Saha, and Adam Welc. Single global lock semantics in a weakly atomic S™. In TRANSACT '08, 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Hardware Support for Transactional Computing, February 2008.

Digital Library

[17]

Vijay Menon, Steven Balensiefer, Tatiana Shpeisman, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Richard L. Hudson, Bratin Saha, and Adam Welc. Towards a lock-based semantics for Java S™. Technical Report UW-CSE-07-11-01, University of Washington, Nov 2007.

[18]

Maged M. Michael. Hazard pointers: Safe memory reclamation for lock-free objects. IEEE Trans. Parallel Distrib. Syst., 15 (6): 491--504, 2004.

Digital Library

[19]

Kevin E. Moore, Jayaram Bobba, Michelle J. Moravan, Mark D. Hill, and David A. Wood. Log™: Log-based transactional memory. In Proc. 12th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture, pages 254--265. February 2006.

[20]

Marek Olszewski, Jeremy Cutler, and J. Gregory Steffan. JudoS™: A dynamic binary-rewriting approach to software transactional memory. In PACT '07: Proc. 16th International Conference on Parallel Architecture and Compilation Techniques, pages 365--375, September 2007.

Digital Library

[21]

Ravi Rajwar and James R. Goodman. Speculative lock elision: enabling highly concurrent multithreaded execution. In MICRO '01: Proc. 34th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Microarchitecture, pages 294--305, December 2001.

Digital Library

[22]

Torvald Riegel and Diogo Becker de Brum. Making object-based S™ practical in unmanaged environments. In TRANSACT '08, 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Languages, Compilers, and Hardware Support for Transactional Computing, February 2008.

[23]

Christopher J. Rossbach, Owen S. Hofmann, Donald E. Porter, Hany E. Ramadan, Bhandari Aditya, and Emmett Witchel. TxLinux: using and managing hardware transactional memory in an operating system. In SOSP '07: Proc. 21st ACM SIGOPS Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 87--102, October 2007.

Digital Library

[24]

Amitabha Roy, Steven Hand, and Tim Harris. Exploring the Limits of Disjoint Access Parallelism. In Proceedings of HotPar '09: 1st USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism (to appear), March 2009.

Digital Library

[25]

Yannis Smaragdakis, Anthony Kay, Reimer Behrends, and Michal Young. General and efficient locking without blocking. In MSPC '08: Proc. 2008 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Memory Systems Performance and Correctness, pages 1--5, March 2008.

Digital Library

[26]

Michael F. Spear, Virendra J. Marathe, Luke Dalessandro, and Michael L. Scott. Privatization techniques for software transactional memory. Technical Report TR 915, Computer Science Department, University of Rochester, February 2007.

Digital Library

[27]

Michael F. Spear, Maged M. Michael, and Michael L. Scott. Inevitability mechanisms for software transactional memory. In TRANSACT '08: Proc 3rd ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Transactional Computing. February 2008.

[28]

Cheng Wang, Wei-Yu Chen, Youfeng Wu, Bratin Saha, and Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai. Code generation and optimization for transactional memory constructs in an unmanaged language. In CGO '07: Proc. 2007 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, pages 34--48, March 2007.

Digital Library

[29]

Yin Wang, Terence Kelly, Manjunath Kudlur, Stéphane Lafortune, and Scott A. Mahlke. Gadara: Dynamic deadlock avoidance for multithreaded programs. In OSDI '08: Proceedings of the 8th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, pages 281--294, 2008.

Digital Library

[30]

Adam Welc, Bratin Saha, and Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai. Irrevocable transactions and their applications. In SPAA '08: Proc. 20th Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, pages 285--296, June 2008.

Digital Library

[31]

Lukasz Ziarek, Adam Welc, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, Vijay Menon, Tatiana Shpeisman, and Suresh Jagannathan. A uniform transactional execution environment for Java. In ECOOP '08: Proc. 22nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, pages 129--154, July 2008.

Digital Library

Cited By

Sheng YHassan ASpear M(2023)Separating Mechanism from Policy in STM2023 32nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT)10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00031(279-296)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00031
Yu TPradel M(2018)Pinpointing and repairing performance bottlenecks in concurrent programsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-017-9578-123:5(3034-3071)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-017-9578-1
Sengupta ACao MBond MKulkarni MReddi VSmith ATang L(2017)Legato: end-to-end bounded region serializability using commodity hardware transactional memoryProceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/3049832.3049834(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3049832.3049834
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

A runtime system for software lock elision
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
    1. Concurrent programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages

Recommendations

Pessimistic software lock-elision
DISC'12: Proceedings of the 26th international conference on Distributed Computing

Read-write locks are one of the most prevalent lock forms in concurrent applications because they allow read accesses to locked code to proceed in parallel. However, they do not offer any parallelism between reads and writes.

This paper introduces ...
Refined transactional lock elision
PPoPP '16

Transactional lock elision (TLE) is a well-known technique that exploits hardware transactional memory (HTM) to introduce concurrency into lock-based software. It achieves that by attempting to execute a critical section protected by a lock in an atomic ...
Software-improved hardware lock elision
PODC '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing

With hardware transactional memory (HTM) becoming available in mainstream processors, lock-based critical sections may now initiate a hardware transaction instead of taking the lock, enabling their concurrent execution unless a real data conflict ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

EuroSys '09: Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems

April 2009

342 pages

ISBN:9781605584829

DOI:10.1145/1519065

General Chair:
Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat
FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
,
Program Chairs:
John Wilkes
Google, Inc., USA
,
Rebecca Isaacs
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 April 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

EuroSys '09

Sponsor:

SIGOPS

EuroSys '09: Fourth EuroSys Conference 2009

April 1 - 3, 2009

Nuremberg, Germany

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 1,308 submissions, 18%

Upcoming Conference

EuroSys '25

Sponsor:
sigops

Twentieth European Conference on Computer Systems

March 30 - April 3, 2025

Rotterdam , Netherlands

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

34
Total Citations
View Citations
481
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)5
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 16 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Sheng YHassan ASpear M(2023)Separating Mechanism from Policy in STM2023 32nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT)10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00031(279-296)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00031
Yu TPradel M(2018)Pinpointing and repairing performance bottlenecks in concurrent programsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-017-9578-123:5(3034-3071)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-017-9578-1
Sengupta ACao MBond MKulkarni MReddi VSmith ATang L(2017)Legato: end-to-end bounded region serializability using commodity hardware transactional memoryProceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/3049832.3049834(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3049832.3049834
Zheng LLiao XJin HLiu H(2017)Exploiting the Parallelism Between Conflicting Critical Sections with Partial ReversionIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2017.272748528:12(3443-3457)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2017.2727485
Sousa GBaldassin A(2017)FGSCM: A Fine-Grained Approach to Transactional Lock Elision2017 29th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD)10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2017.22(113-120)Online publication date: Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2017.22
Sengupta ACao MBond MKulkarni M(2017)Legato: End-to-end bounded region serializability using commodity hardware transactional memory2017 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)10.1109/CGO.2017.7863724(1-13)Online publication date: Feb-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/CGO.2017.7863724
Guerraoui RTrigonakis V(2016)Optimistic concurrency with OPTIKACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3016078.285114651:8(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3016078.2851146
Antić JChatzopoulos GGuerraoui RTrigonakis V(2016)Locking Made EasyProceedings of the 17th International Middleware Conference10.1145/2988336.2988357(1-14)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2988336.2988357
Estebanez ALlanos DGonzalez-Escribano A(2016)A Survey on Thread-Level Speculation TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/293836949:2(1-39)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2938369
Yu TPradel MZeller ARoychoudhury A(2016)SyncProf: detecting, localizing, and optimizing synchronization bottlenecksProceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2931037.2931070(389-400)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2931037.2931070
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents