NOrec: streamlining STM by abolishing ownership records

Drawing inspiration from several previous projects, we present an ownership-record-free software transactional memory (STM) system that combines extremely low overhead with unusually clean semantics. While unlikely to scale to hundreds of active threads, this "NOrec" system offers many appealing features: very low fast-path latency--as low as any system we know of that admits concurrent updates; publication and privatization safety; livelock freedom; a small, constant amount of global metadata, and full compatibility with existing data structure layouts; no false conflicts due to hash collisions; compatibility with both managed and unmanaged languages, and both static and dynamic compilation; and easy accommodation of closed nesting, inevitable (irrevocable) transactions, and starvation avoidance mechanisms. To the best of our knowledge, no extant STM system combines this set of features. While transactional memory for processors with hundreds of cores is likely to require h...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Luke Dalessandro, Michael F. Spear, Michael L. Scott
• Keywords: Closed Nesting, Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2010, Software Transactional Memory, Starvation Avoidance Mechanisms