A case for an SC-preserving compiler

Abstract

The most intuitive memory consistency model for shared-memory multi-threaded programming is sequential consistency (SC). However, current concurrent programming languages support a relaxed model, as such relaxations are deemed necessary for enabling important optimizations. This paper demonstrates that an SC-preserving compiler, one that ensures that every SC behavior of a compiler-generated binary is an SC behavior of the source program, retains most of the performance benefits of an optimizing compiler. The key observation is that a large class of optimizations crucial for performance are either already SC-preserving or can be modified to preserve SC while retaining much of their effectiveness. An SC-preserving compiler, obtained by restricting the optimization phases in LLVM, a state-of-the-art C/C++ compiler, incurs an average slowdown of 3.8% and a maximum slowdown of 34% on a set of 30 programs from the SPLASH-2, PARSEC, and SPEC CINT2006 benchmark suites.