Scheduling support for transactional memory contention management

Transactional Memory (TM) is considered as one of the most promising paradigms for developing concurrent applications. TM has been shown to scale well on multiple cores when the data access pattern behaves "well," i.e., when few conflicts are induced. In contrast, data patterns with frequent write sharing, with long transactions, or when many threads contend for a smaller number of cores, result in numerous conflicts. Until recently, TM implementations had little control of transactional threads, which remained under the supervision of the kernel's transaction-ignorant scheduler. Conflicts are thus traditionally resolved by consulting an STM-level contention manager. Consequently, the contention managers of these "conventional" TM implementations suffer from a lack of precision and often fail to ensure reasonable performance in high-contention workloads. Recently, scheduling-based TM contention-management has been proposed for increasing TM efficiency under hi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Walther Maldonado, Patrick Marlier, Pascal Felber, Adi Suissa, Danny Hendler, Alexandra Fedorova, Julia L. Lawall, Gilles Muller
• Keywords: Kernel-level Tm Scheduling, Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2010, TM Contention Management, User-level Tm Library