A Case Study of the Interplay between Conflict Management and Version Management in Hardware Transactional Memory Systems

Abstract

As one of the most potential solution to parallel programming on the future many-core platforms, Transactional Memory (TM) systems have attracted a great deal of attention from both the industry and academic since the first TM was proposed in 1993. Various design and implementation proposals have been proposed to improve the performance while reducing the overheads. Recent investigations of the high-contention and coarse-grained transactional workloads on TMs reveal various pathologies that will offset the performance benefits. In this paper, we analysis the advantages and disadvantages of the existing conflict management and version management schemes, make a case study in the interplay between conflict management and version management in hardware transactional memory systems, to learn its impact on performance and find some interesting appearance that can guide the future design. In particular, apply software runtime environment to support recognize application's dynamic behaviors and resolve transactional conflicts can obtain an average speedup of 11.7% across the 8 applications selected from the STAMP benchmark suite on DynTM, which is regarded as one of the most latest progress in hardware transactional memory systems.