Leveraging parallel nesting in transactional memory

Exploiting the emerging reality of affordable multi-core architeces through providing programmers with simple abstractions that would enable them to easily turn their sequential programs into concurrent ones that expose as much parallelism as possible. While transactional memory promises to make concurrent programming easy to a wide programmer community, current implementations either disallow nested transactions to run in parallel or do not scale to arbitrary parallel nesting depths. This is an important obstacle to the central goal of transactional memory, as programmers can only start parallel threads in restricted parts of their code. This paper addresses the intrinsic difficulty behind the support for parallel nesting in transactional memory, and proposes a novel solution that, to the best of our knowledge, is the first practical solution to meet the lowest theoretical upper bound known for the problem. Using a synthetic workload configured to test parallel transactions on a mult...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: João Barreto, Aleksandar Dragojevic, Paulo Ferreira, Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka
• Keywords: Parallel Computing, Parallel Nesting Depths, Parallel Transactions, PPOPP 2010, Transactional Memory