Stretching transactional memory

Transactional memory (TM) is an appealing abstraction for programming multi-core systems. Potential target applications for TM, such as business software and video games, are likely to involve complex data structures and large transactions, requiring specific software solutions (STM). So far, however, STMs have been mainly evaluated and optimized for smaller scale benchmarks. We revisit the main STM design choices from the perspective of complex workloads and propose a new STM, which we call SwissTM. In short, SwissTM is lock- and word-based and uses (1) optimistic (commit-time) conflict detection for read/write conflicts and pessimistic (encounter-time) conflict detection for write/write conflicts, as well as (2) a new two-phase contention manager that ensures the progress of long transactions while inducing no overhead on short ones. SwissTM outperforms state-of-theart STM implementations, namely RSTM, TL2, and TinySTM, in our experiments on STMBench7, STAMP, Lee-TM and red-bla...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Aleksandar Dragojevic, Rachid Guerraoui, Michal Kapalka
• Keywords: Main Stm Design, PLDI 2009, Programming Languages, State-of-theart Stm Implementations, STM Design Choices