Transactions as the Foundation of a Memory Consistency Model

Dalessandro, Luke; Scott, Michael L.; Spear, Michael

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-15763-9_4

Cited by 17 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 46 publications

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“…Some researchers have argued that despite these benefits, strong atomicity is not worth its costs in existing STMs [12,14]. By providing strong atomicity naturally at low cost, this paper's STM offers a new data point to consider in the tradeoff between performance and semantics.…”

Section: Transactional Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low-overhead software transactional memory with progress guarantees and strong semantics

Zhang

Huang

Cao

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming

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Software transactional memory offers an appealing alternative to locks by improving programmability, reliability, and scalability. However, existing STMs are impractical because they add high instrumentation costs and often provide weak progress guarantees and/or semantics.This paper introduces a novel STM called LarkTM that provides three significant features. (1) Its instrumentation adds low overhead except when accesses actually conflict, enabling low single-thread overhead and scaling well on low-contention workloads. (2) It uses eager concurrency control mechanisms, yet naturally supports flexible conflict resolution, enabling strong progress guarantees. (3) It naturally provides strong atomicity semantics at low cost.LarkTM's design works well for low-contention workloads, but adds significant overhead under higher contention, so we design an adaptive version of LarkTM that uses alternative concurrency control for high-contention objects.An implementation and evaluation in a Java virtual machine show that the basic and adaptive versions of LarkTM not only provide low single-thread overhead, but their multithreaded performance compares favorably with existing high-performance STMs.

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Section: Transactional Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low-overhead software transactional memory with progress guarantees and strong semantics

Zhang

Huang

Cao

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming

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“…Dalessandro et al [2010b] have observed that privatization is semantically equivalent to locking-it renders a shared object temporarily private. e canonical example of privatization arises with shared containers through which threads pass objects to one another.…”

Section: E Privatization Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shared-Memory Synchronization

Scott¹

2013

Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture

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Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture publishes 50-to 100-page publications on topics pertaining to the science and art of designing, analyzing, selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals. e scope will largely follow the purview of premier computer architecture conferences, such as ISCA, HPCA, MICRO, and ASPLOS. ABSTRACTSince the advent of time sharing in the 1960s, designers of concurrent and parallel systems have needed to synchronize the activities of threads of control that share data structures in memory. In recent years, the study of synchronization has gained new urgency with the proliferation of multicore processors, on which even relatively simple user-level programs must frequently run in parallel.is lecture offers a comprehensive survey of shared-memory synchronization, with an emphasis on "systems-level" issues. It includes sufficient coverage of architectural details to understand correctness and performance on modern multicore machines, and sufficient coverage of higher-level issues to understand how synchronization is embedded in modern programming languages.e primary intended audience is "systems programmers"-the authors of operating systems, library packages, language run-time systems, concurrent data structures, and server and utility programs. Much of the discussion should also be of interest to application programmers who want to make good use of the synchronization mechanisms available to them, and to computer architects who want to understand the ramifications of their design decisions on systems-level code.

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“…(Also: perlocation timestamps aren't privatization safe [16].) As an alternative to opacity, an STM system may sandbox inconsistent transactions by performing validation immediately before any "dangerous" instruction, rather than after every load [5], but for safety in the general case, a very large number of validations may still be required.…”

Section: How Do We Validate?mentioning

confidence: 98%

Compiler aided manual speculation for high performance concurrent data structures

Xiang

Scott

2013

Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming

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Speculation is a well-known means of increasing parallelism among concurrent methods that are usually but not always independent. Traditional nonblocking data structures employ a particularly restrictive form of speculation. Software transactional memory (STM) systems employ a much more general-though typically blocking-form, and there is a wealth of options in between.Using several different concurrent data structures as examples, we show that manual addition of speculation to traditional lockbased code can lead to significant performance improvements. Successful speculation requires careful consideration of profitability, and of how and when to validate consistency. Unfortunately, it also requires substantial modifications to code structure and a deep understanding of the memory model. These latter requirements make it difficult to use in its purely manual form, even for expert programmers. To simplify the process, we present a compiler tool, CSpec, that automatically generates speculative code from baseline lock-based code with user annotations. Compiler-aided manual speculation keeps the original code structure for better readability and maintenance, while providing the flexibility to chose speculation and validation strategies. Experiments on UltraSPARC and x86 platforms demonstrate that with a small number annotations added to lock-based code, CSpec can generate speculative code that matches the performance of best-effort hand-written versions.

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Transactions as the Foundation of a Memory Consistency Model

Cited by 17 publications

References 46 publications

Low-overhead software transactional memory with progress guarantees and strong semantics

Low-overhead software transactional memory with progress guarantees and strong semantics

Shared-Memory Synchronization

Compiler aided manual speculation for high performance concurrent data structures

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