Transactional conflict decoupling and value prediction

• Authors: Fuad Tabba;Andrew W. Hay;James R. Goodman
• Venue: Proceedings of the international conference on Supercomputing
• Year: 2011

This paper explores data speculation for improving the performance of Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM). We attempt to reduce transactional conflicts by decoupling them from cache coherence conflicts; many HTMs do not distinguish between transactional conflicts and coherence conflicts, leading to false transactional conflicts. We also attempt to mitigate the effects of coherence conflicts by using value prediction in transactions. We show that coherence decoupling and value prediction in transactions complement each other, because they both speculate on data in ways that are infeasible in the absence of HTM support. As a demonstration of how data speculation can improve performance, we introduce DPTM, a best-effort HTM that mitigates the effects of false sharing at the cache line level. DPTM does not alter the underlying cache coherence protocol, and requires only minor, processor-local, modifications. We evaluate DPTM against a baseline best-effort HTM, and compare it with data restructuring by padding, the most commonly used method to avoid false sharing. Our experiments show that DPTM can dramatically improve performance in the presence of false sharing without degrading performance in its absence, and consistently performs better than restructuring by padding.