Flexible Decoupled Transactional Memory Support

A high-concurrency transactional memory (TM) implementation needs to track concurrent accesses, buffer speculative updates, and manage conflicts. We present a system, FlexTM (FLEXible Transactional Memory), that coordinates four decoupled hardware mechanisms: read and write signatures, which summari...

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Veröffentlicht in:2008 International Symposium on Computer Architecture S. 139 - 150
Hauptverfasser: Shriraman, Arrvindh, Dwarkadas, Sandhya, Scott, Michael L.
Format: Tagungsbericht
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society 01.06.2008
IEEE
Schriftenreihe:ACM Conferences
Schlagworte:
Cache coherence
Computer architecture
Computer science
Computer systems organization > Architectures > Parallel architectures > Multiple instruction, multiple data
Concurrent computing
Conflict detection
Delay systems
FlexTM
Hardware
Hardware > Hardware validation
Hardware > Integrated circuits > Semiconductor memory
Hardware > Integrated circuits > Semiconductor memory > Dynamic memory
Memory management
Multiprocessors
Protocols
Read-write memory
RTM
Software prototyping
Theory of computation > Models of computation > Concurrency
Theory of computation > Models of computation > Concurrency > Parallel computing models
Transactional memory
Yarn
Cache coherence
Conflict detection
Multiprocessors
FlexTM
Hardware
RTM
Transactional memory
ISBN:9780769531748, 0769531741
ISSN:1063-6897
Online-Zugang:Volltext
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Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:A high-concurrency transactional memory (TM) implementation needs to track concurrent accesses, buffer speculative updates, and manage conflicts. We present a system, FlexTM (FLEXible Transactional Memory), that coordinates four decoupled hardware mechanisms: read and write signatures, which summarize per-thread access sets; per-thread conflict summary tables (CSTs), which identify the threads with which conflicts have occurred; Programmable Data Isolation, which maintains speculative updates in the local cache and employs a thread-private buffer (in virtual memory) in the rare event of overflow; and Alert-On-Update, which selectively notifies threads about coherence events. All mechanisms are software-accessible, to enable virtualization and to support transactions of arbitrary length. FlexTM allows software to determine when to manage conflicts (either eagerly or lazily), and to employ a variety of conflict management and commit protocols. We describe an STM-inspired protocol thatuses CSTs to manage conflicts in a distributed manner (no global arbitration) and allows parallel commits. In experiments with a prototype on Simics/GEMS, FlexTM exhibits 5x speedup over high-quality software TM, with no loss in policy flexibility. Its distributed commit protocol is also more efficient than a central hardware manager. Our results highlight the importance of flexibility in determining when to manage conflicts: lazy maximizes concurrency and helps to ensure forward progress while eager provides better overall utilization in a multi-programmed system.
ISBN:9780769531748
0769531741
ISSN:1063-6897
DOI:10.1109/ISCA.2008.17