An effective hybrid transactional memory system with strong isolation guarantees

We propose signature-accelerated transactional memory (SigTM), a hybrid TM system that reduces the overhead of software transactions. SigTM uses hardware signatures to track the read-set and write-set for pending transactions and perform conflict detection between concurrent threads. All other transactional functionality, including data versioning, is implemented in software. Unlike previously proposed hybrid TM systems, SigTM requires no modifications to the hardware caches, which reduces hardware cost and simplifies support for nested transactions and multithreaded processor cores. SigTM is also the first hybrid TM system to provide strong isolation guarantees between transactional blocks and nontransactional accesses without additional read and write barriers in non-transactional code. Using a set of parallel programs that make frequent use of coarsegrain transactions, we show that SigTM accelerates software transactions by 30% to 280%. For certain workloads, SigTM can match th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Chi Cao Minh, Martin Trautmann, JaeWoong Chung, Austen McDonald, Nathan Grasso Bronson, Jared Casper, Christos Kozyrakis, Kunle Olukotun
• Keywords: Hardware, Hybrid Tm, ISCA 2007, Strong Isolation Guarantees, TM Systems