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    Composability for Application-Specific Transactional Optimizations

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    Author
    Zhang, Rui; Budimlić, Zoran; Scherer, William N., III
    Date
    January 21, 2010
    Abstract
    Software Transactional Memory (STM) has made great advances towards acceptance into mainstream programming by promising a programming model that greatly reduces the complexity of writing concurrent programs. Unfortunately, the mechanisms in current STM implementations that enforce the fundamental properties of transactions — atomicity, consistency, and isolation — also introduce considerable performance overhead. This performance impact can be so significant that in practice, programmers are tempted to leverage their knowledge of a specific application to carefully bypass STM calls and instead access shared memory directly. While this technique can be very effective in improving performance, it breaks the consistency and isolation properties of transactions, which have to be handled manually by the programmer for the specific application. It also tends to break another desirable property of transactions: composability. In this paper, we identify the composability problem and propose two STM system extensions to provide transaction composability in the presence of direct shared memory reads by transactions. Our proposed extensions give the programmer a similar level of flexibility and performance when optimizing the STM application as the existing practices, while preserving composability. We evaluate our extensions on several benchmarks on a 16-way SMP. The results show that our extensions provide performance competitive with hand-optimized non-composable techniques, while still maintaining transactional composability.
    Citation
    Zhang, Rui, Budimlić, Zoran and Scherer, William N., III. "Composability for Application-Specific Transactional Optimizations." (2010) https://hdl.handle.net/1911/96382.
    Type
    Technical report
    Citable link to this page
    https://hdl.handle.net/1911/96382
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    You are granted permission for the noncommercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, but this permission is only for a period of forty-five (45) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the Computer Science Department of Rice University under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).
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    Managed by the Digital Scholarship Services at Fondren Library, Rice University
    Physical Address: 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005
    Mailing Address: MS-44, P.O.BOX 1892, Houston, Texas 77251-1892
    Site Map