Enforcing isolation and ordering in STM

Shpeisman, Tatiana; Menon, Vijay; Adl-Tabatabai, Ali-Reza; Balensiefer, Steven; Grossman, Dan; Hudson, Richard L.; Moore, Katherine F.; Saha, Badal C.

doi:10.1145/1250734.1250744

Cited by 137 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…However, strong atomicity is more difficult to implement in software transactional memory systems. Most software transactional memory proposals so far have only supported weak atomicity, but recent work, e.g., [13,91,6,2], show how some of these short-comings can be addressed.…”

Section: Strong and Weak Atomicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Transactional memory

Grahn¹

2010

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing

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Current and future processor generations are based on multicore architectures where the performance increase comes from an increasing number of cores on a chip. In order to utilize the performance potential of multicore architectures the programs also need to be parallel, but writing parallel programs is a non-trivial task. Transactional memory tries to ease parallel program development by providing atomic and isolated execution of code sequences, enabling software composability and protected access to shared data. In addition, transactional memory has the ability to execute atomic code sequences in parallel as long as no data conflicts occur. Transactional memory implementation proposals exist for both hardware and software, as well as hybrid solutions. This special issue on transactional memory introduces transactional memory as a concept, presents an overview of some of the most important approaches so far, and finally, includes five articles that advances the state-of-the-art in transactional memory research.

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Section: Strong and Weak Atomicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One problem with software transactional memory systems only supporting weak atomicity (isolation) is the privatization problem [95,91,1]. The problem occurs when a thread makes some shared object(s) private for, e.g., performance reasons.…”

Section: Privatizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transactional memory

Grahn¹

2010

Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing

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“…It follows that war and waw dependencies are implicitly satisfied. In-place models [16,8,20] access (modify) directly the program state, while still enforcing the sequential semantics. Important differences with respect to serial commit models are that (i) all types of dependencies (raw, war and waw) may generate violations, but (ii) they are scalable -in number of processors that may contribute to speed-up, and (iii) allow a more flexible iteration-to-thread partitioning (threads may execute non-consecutive groups of iterations, see later).…”

Section: Software Tlsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Set-Congruence Dynamic Analysis for Thread-Level Speculation (TLS)

Oancea

Mycroft

2008

Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing

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Abstract. The move to multi-core has increased interest in parallelizing sequential programs. Classical dependency-based techniques can be successful for some classes of programs, but all too often such (static) analysis disallow parallelization because of the need for safe (one-sided) approximations of behaviour. Thread Level Speculation (tls) enables increased parallelization by allowing out-of-order execution; correct dependencies are ensured by run-time monitoring and possible rollbacks. Two-sided approximations of program behaviour are now acceptable so long as the rollback ratio is kept small. We describe dynamic analysis based on representing dependencies as modular congruences. One, thread partitioning, efficiently enables loop iterations to be allocated to threads (and calculates the maximum effective concurrency); the other, fine-grain memory partitioning, calculates a hash function which reduces performance loss due to TLS-metadata-based and cache-based task interference. The dynamic analysis can be used either on-line (during execution) or off-line (based on previous training runs).

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“…Many possible semantics for TM have been proposed, including strong and weak isolation (also known as strong and weak atomicity) [1,17], single lock atomicity (SLA) [7], and approaches based on language memory models [4], linearizability [5,15], and operational semantics [12]. Of these, SLA has received the most attention.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ordering-Based Semantics for Software Transactional Memory

Spear

Dalessandro

Marathe

et al. 2008

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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It has been widely suggested that memory transactions should behave as if they acquired and released a single global lock. Unfortunately, this behavior can be expensive to achieve, particularly whenas in the natural publication/privatization idiom-the same data are accessed both transactionally and nontransactionally. To avoid overhead, we propose selective strict serializability (SSS) semantics, in which transactions have a global total order, but nontransactional accesses are globally ordered only with respect to explicitly marked transactions. Our definition of SSS formally characterizes the permissible behaviors of an STM system without recourse to locks. If all transactions are marked, then SSS, singlelock semantics, and database-style strict serializability are equivalent.We evaluate several SSS implementations in the context of a TL2-like STM system. We also evaluate a weaker model, selective flow serializability (SFS), which is similar in motivation to the asymmetric lock atomicity of Menon et al. We argue that ordering-based semantics are conceptually preferable to lock-based semantics, and just as efficient.

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Enforcing isolation and ordering in STM

Cited by 137 publications

References 68 publications

Transactional memory

Transactional memory

Set-Congruence Dynamic Analysis for Thread-Level Speculation (TLS)

Ordering-Based Semantics for Software Transactional Memory

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