Using data structure knowledge for efficient lock generation and strong atomicity

To achieve high-performance on multicore systems, sharedmemory parallel languages must efficiently implement atomic operations. The commonly used and studied paradigms for atomicity are fine-grained locking, which is both difficult to program and error-prone; optimistic software transactions, which require substantial overhead to detect and recover from atomicity violations; and compiler-generation of locks from programmer-specified atomic sections, which leads to serialization whenever imprecise pointer analysis suggests the mere possibility of a conflicting operation. This paper presents a new strategy for compiler-generated locking that uses data structure knowledge to facilitate more precise alias and lock generation analyses and reduce unnecessary serialization. Implementing and evaluating these ideas in the Java language shows that the new strategy achieves eight-thread speedups of 0.83 to 5.9 for the five STAMP benchmarks studied, outperforming software transactions on all but ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Gautam Upadhyaya, Samuel P. Midkiff, Vijay S. Pai
• Keywords: Atomicity Violations, Fine-grained Locking, Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2010, Programmer-specified Fine-grained Locks