On the (dis)similarity of transactional memory workloads

— Programming to exploit the resources in a multicore system remains a major obstacle for both computer and software engineers. Transactional memory offers an attractive alternative to traditional concurrent programming but implementations emerged before the programming model, leaving a gap in the design process. In previous research, transactional microbenchmarks have been used to evaluate designs or lockbased multithreaded workloads have been manually converted into their transactional equivalents; others have even created dedicated transactional benchmarks. Yet, throughout all of the investigations, transactional memory researchers have not settled on a way to describe the runtime characteristics that these programs exhibit; nor has there been any attempt to unify the way transactional memory implementations are evaluated. In addition, the similarity (or redundancy) of these workloads is largely unknown. Evaluating transactional memory designs using workloads that exhibit similar ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IISWC
• Authors: Clay Hughes, James Poe, Amer Qouneh, Tao Li
• Keywords: IISWC 2009, Operating Systems, Transactional Memory, Transactional Memory Researchers, Transactional Memory Workloads