Hardware Transactional Memory with Operating System Support, HTMOS

Abstract. Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) gives software developers the opportunity to write parallel programs more easily compared to any previous programming method, and yields better performance than most previous lock-based synchronizations. Current implementations of HTM perform very well with small transactions. But when a transaction overows the cache, these implementations either abort the transaction as unsuitable for HTM, and let software takeover, or revert to some much more inecient hash-like in-memory structure, usually located in the userspace. We present a fast, scalable solution that has virtually no limit on transaction size, has low transactional read and write overhead, works with physical addresses, and doesn't require any changes inside the cache subsystem. This paper presents an HTMOS - Operating System (OS) and Architecture modications that leverage the existing OS Virtual Memory mechanisms, to support unbounded transaction sizes, and provide transact...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: EUROPAR
• Authors: Sasa Tomic, Adrián Cristal, Osman S. Unsal, Mateo Valero
• Keywords: EUROPAR 2007, Hardware Transactional Memory, Transaction Sizes, Unbounded Transaction Sizes