Algorithms for scalable synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS)
Transactional memory: architectural support for lock-free data structures
ISCA '93 Proceedings of the 20th annual international symposium on computer architecture
Efficient synchronization: let them eat QOLB
Proceedings of the 24th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Software transactional memory for dynamic-sized data structures
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual symposium on Principles of distributed computing
HPCA '02 Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Improving Value Communication for Thread-Level Speculation
HPCA '02 Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Virtualizing Transactional Memory
Proceedings of the 32nd annual international symposium on Computer Architecture
Multifacet's general execution-driven multiprocessor simulator (GEMS) toolset
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News - Special issue: dasCMP'05
Unbounded Transactional Memory
IEEE Micro
Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Dependence-aware transactional memory for increased concurrency
Proceedings of the 41st annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture
Limited early value communication to improve performance of transactional memory
Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Supercomputing
Transactional conflict decoupling and value prediction
Proceedings of the international conference on Supercomputing
Distributed replay protocol for distributed uniprocessors
Proceedings of the 26th ACM international conference on Supercomputing
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Transactional Memory (TM) is an optimistic speculative synchronization scheme that provides atomic execution for a region of code marked as a transaction by the programmer. TM avoids many of the problems associated with lock-based synchronization and can make writing parallel programs relatively easier. Programs with critical sections that are not heavily contended benefit from the optimistic nature of TM systems. However, for heavily contended critical sections, performance can degrade due to conflicts leading to stalls and expensive rollbacks. In this paper, we look into the nature of the shared data involved in conflicts for TM systems. We find that most transactions have conflicts around a few shared addresses, and shared-conflicting data is often updated in a predictable manner by different transactions. We propose using a memory-level value predictor to capture this predictability for such data structures and increase overall concurrency by satisfying loads from conflicting transactions with predicted values, instead of stalling. In this paper, we present one possible design and implementation of a TM system with a value predictor. Our benchmark results show that the value predictor can capture this predictable behavior for most benchmarks and can improve performance of TM programs by improving concurrency and minimizing stalls and rollbacks.