article

Enforcing isolation and ordering in STM

Authors:

Tatiana Shpeisman,

Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai,

Steven Balensiefer,

Richard L. Hudson,

Katherine F. Moore,

Bratin SahaAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 42, Issue 6

Pages 78 - 88

https://doi.org/10.1145/1273442.1250744

Published: 10 June 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Transactional memory provides a new concurrency control mechanism that avoids many of the pitfalls of lock-based synchronization. High-performance software transactional memory (STM) implementations thus far provide weak atomicity: Accessing shared data both inside and outside a transaction can result in unexpected, implementation-dependent behavior. To guarantee isolation and consistent ordering in such a system, programmers are expected to enclose all shared-memory accesses inside transactions.

A system that provides strong atomicity guarantees isolation even in the presence of threads that access shared data outside transactions. A strongly-atomic system also orders transactions with conflicting non-transactional memory operations in a consistent manner.

In this paper, we discuss some surprising pitfalls of weak atomicity, and we present an STM system that avoids these problems via strong atomicity. We demonstrate how to implement non-transactional data accesses via efficient read and write barriers, and we present compiler optimizations that further reduce the overheads of these barriers. We introduce a dynamic escape analysis that differentiates private and public data at runtime to make barriers cheaper and a static not-accessed-in-transaction analysis that removes many barriers completely. Our results on a set of Java programs show that strong atomicity can be implemented efficiently in a high-performance STM system.

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Cited By

Wang WYew PZhai AMcCamant SMars JTang LXue JWu P(2020)Efficient and scalable cross-ISA virtualization of hardware transactional memoryProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3368826.3377919(107-120)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368826.3377919
Zhang MHuang JCao MBond MCohen AGrove D(2015)Low-overhead software transactional memory with progress guarantees and strong semanticsProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/2688500.2688510(97-108)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2688500.2688510
Scott M(2013)Shared-Memory SynchronizationSynthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture10.2200/S00499ED1V01Y201304CAC0238:2(1-221)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2013
https://doi.org/10.2200/S00499ED1V01Y201304CAC023
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Index Terms

Enforcing isolation and ordering in STM
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Parallel computing methodologies
    1. Parallel programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Runtime environments
      2. Source code generation
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Concurrent programming structures
      2. Language types
        Parallel programming languages

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 6

Proceedings of the 2007 PLDI conference

June 2007

491 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1273442

Issue’s Table of Contents

PLDI '07: Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
June 2007
508 pages
ISBN:9781595936332
DOI:10.1145/1250734
General Chair:
Jeanne Ferrante
University of California, San Diego, USA
,
Program Chair:
Kathryn S. McKinley
University of Texas at Austin, USA

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 10 June 2007

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 42, Issue 6

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Cited By

Wang WYew PZhai AMcCamant SMars JTang LXue JWu P(2020)Efficient and scalable cross-ISA virtualization of hardware transactional memoryProceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1145/3368826.3377919(107-120)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3368826.3377919
Zhang MHuang JCao MBond MCohen AGrove D(2015)Low-overhead software transactional memory with progress guarantees and strong semanticsProceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming10.1145/2688500.2688510(97-108)Online publication date: 24-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2688500.2688510
Scott M(2013)Shared-Memory SynchronizationSynthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture10.2200/S00499ED1V01Y201304CAC0238:2(1-221)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2013
https://doi.org/10.2200/S00499ED1V01Y201304CAC023
Blanton EZiarek LSiebert FNilsen K(2013)Non-blocking inter-partition communication with wait-free pair transactionsProceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Java Technologies for Real-time and Embedded Systems10.1145/2512989.2512994(58-67)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2512989.2512994
Attiya HHillel E(2013)The Cost of Privatization in Software Transactional MemoryIEEE Transactions on Computers10.1109/TC.2012.15962:12(2531-2543)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TC.2012.159
Afek YMatveev AShavit N(2012)Pessimistic software lock-elisionProceedings of the 26th international conference on Distributed Computing10.1007/978-3-642-33651-5_21(297-311)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-33651-5_21
Crain TKanellou ERaynal M(2012)STM systemsProceedings of the 12th international conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing - Volume Part I10.1007/978-3-642-33078-0_23(317-331)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-33078-0_23
Attiya H(2011)Invited paperProceedings of the 12th international conference on Distributed computing and networking10.5555/1946143.1946144(1-11)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2011
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1946143.1946144
Afek YAvni HShavit N(2011)Towards consistency oblivious programmingProceedings of the 15th international conference on Principles of Distributed Systems10.1007/978-3-642-25873-2_6(65-79)Online publication date: 13-Dec-2011
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Afek YKorland GZilberstein A(2011)Lowering STM Overhead with Static AnalysisLanguages and Compilers for Parallel Computing10.1007/978-3-642-19595-2_3(31-45)Online publication date: 2011
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19595-2_3
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