Reconciling transactional conflicts with compiler's help
Pages 53 - 62
Abstract
Software transactional memory(STM) is a promising programming paradigm for shared memory multithreaded programs. While STM offers the promise of being less error-prone and more programmer friendly compared to traditional lock-based synchronization, it also needs to be competitive in performance in order for it to be adopted in mainstream software. A major source of performance overheads in STM is transactional aborts. Conflict resolution and aborting a transaction typically happens at the transaction level which has the advantage that it is automatic and application agnostic. However it has a substantial disadvantage in that STM declares the entire transaction as conflicting and hence aborts it and re-executes it fully, instead of partially re-executing only those part(s) of the transaction, which have been affected due to the conflict. This "Re-execute Everything" approach has a significant adverse impact on STM performance.
In order to mitigate the abort overheads, we propose a compiler aided Selective Reconciliation STM (SR-STM) scheme, wherein certain transactional conflicts can be reconciled by performing partial re-execution of the transaction. Ours is a selective hybrid approach which uses compiler analysis to identify those data accesses which are legal and profitable candidates for reconciliation and applies partial re-execution only to these candidates selectively while other conflicting data accesses are handled by the default STM approach of abort and full re-execution. We describe the compiler analysis and code transformations required for supporting selective reconciliation. We find that SR-STM is effective in reducing the transactional abort overheads by improving the performance for a set of five STAMP benchmarks by 12.58% on an average and up to 22.34%.
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Index Terms
- Reconciling transactional conflicts with compiler's help
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Published In
March 2012
285 pages
ISBN:9781450312066
DOI:10.1145/2259016
- General Chairs:
- Carol Eidt,
- Anne Holler,
- Program Chairs:
- Uma Srinivasan,
- Saman Amarasinghe
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Published: 31 March 2012
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CGO '12: Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization
March 31 - April 4, 2012
California, San Jose
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CGO '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 90 submissions, 29%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 312 of 1,061 submissions, 29%
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