Purge-Rehab: Eager Software Transactional Memory with High Performance Under Contention

Transactional memory is a programming model that attempts to make parallel programming easier. Transactional memory uses either eager (at encounter time) or lazy (at commit time) validation to check for conflicting accesses between concurrent transactions, and researchers have been divided over whic...

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Veröffentlicht in:International journal of parallel programming Jg. 44; H. 6; S. 1359 - 1383
Hauptverfasser: Siddique, Abubakar, Ansari, Mohammad, Luján, Mikel
Format: Journal Article
Sprache:Englisch
Veröffentlicht: New York Springer US 01.12.2016
Springer Nature B.V
Schlagworte:
Analysis
Benchmarks
Computer memory
Computer programs
Computer Science
Exploration
Parallel processing
Parallel programming
Performance evaluation
Processor Architectures
Programming
Software
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
State of the art
Studies
Theory of Computation
Weight reduction
Conflict detection
Livelock
Starvation
Software transactional memory
Lazy validation
Contention management
Eager validation
ISSN:0885-7458, 1573-7640
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Zusammenfassung:Transactional memory is a programming model that attempts to make parallel programming easier. Transactional memory uses either eager (at encounter time) or lazy (at commit time) validation to check for conflicting accesses between concurrent transactions, and researchers have been divided over which approach is best. Despite this, there is little work in the literature evaluating their comparative performance. One exploration of this topic using microbenchmarks found that lazy outperforms eager and increases its advantage as contention rises. Furthermore, eager was prone to livelock when accesses were irregular, which resulted in starvation and low throughput. We revisit the comparative performance of eager and lazy under contention using a larger set of microbenchmarks, more complex benchmarks from STAMP, and against multiple state-of-the-art STMs: word-based RSTM, TinySTM and SwissTM. We validate earlier findings that eager suffers from livelock, especially when accesses are irregular. This inspired Purge-Rehab: a lightweight mechanism for controlling transaction restarts in eager validation to reduce livelock and thus improve throughput and reduce starvation. Compared to lazy validation, Purge-Rehab achieves higher performance in five benchmarks, similar in four, and is lower in only one, showing that eager validation can achieve high performance under contention. Purge-Rehab is implemented in word-based RSTM, but is applicable to any eager STM.
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ISSN:0885-7458
1573-7640
DOI:10.1007/s10766-016-0427-4