Transactional memory: architectural support for lock-free data structures
ISCA '93 Proceedings of the 20th annual international symposium on computer architecture
Proceedings of the fourteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Nonblocking algorithms and preemption-safe locking on multiprogrammed shared memory multiprocessors
Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Obstruction-Free Synchronization: Double-Ended Queues as an Example
ICDCS '03 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems
Software transactional memory for dynamic-sized data structures
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Revocable locks for non-blocking programming
Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Advanced contention management for dynamic software transactional memory
Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
Toward a theory of transactional contention managers
Proceedings of the twenty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
McRT-STM: a high performance software transactional memory system for a multi-core runtime
Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Time-based transactional memory with scalable time bases
Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM symposium on Parallel algorithms and architectures
Understanding Tradeoffs in Software Transactional Memory
Proceedings of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization
Toward high performance nonblocking software transactional memory
Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Dynamic performance tuning of word-based software transactional memory
Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
A comprehensive strategy for contention management in software transactional memory
Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
Steal-on-Abort: Improving Transactional Memory Performance through Dynamic Transaction Reordering
HiPEAC '09 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers
Stretching transactional memory
Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation
Scheduling support for transactional memory contention management
Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
RobuSTM: a robust software transactional memory
SSS'10 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Stabilization, safety, and security of distributed systems
DISC'06 Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Distributed Computing
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Lock-based software transactional memory algorithms do not perform well in workloads with a high rate of context switches, which is caused for example by scheduling events or page faults. This occurs since threads that are switched-out by the operating system while holding locks block other threads from progressing, causing their transactions to abort repeatedly. We present here Lock Stealing, a novel contention management algorithm for minimizing the effect of context switches by enabling threads to acquire locks which are held by other threads. While some methods addressing this problem exist (e.g., schedctl in Solaris) they are best effort and only cover scheduling related context switches. In addition, they are platform specific and thus are not suitable or available in managed runtimes such as Java or .NET. In contrast, our approach is solely based on user-level code and is de-coupled from specific operating system events. We evaluate the performance of our approach on a set of benchmarks and observe improvements in both micro benchmarks and more elaborate test applications.