A priority scheduling for TM pathologies

Abstract

Developing a parallel program on Chip multi-processors (CMPs) is a critical and difficult issue. To overcome the synchronization obstacles of CMPs, transactional memory (TM) has been proposed as an alternative control concurrency mechanism, instead of using traditional lock synchronization. Unfortunately, TM has led to seven performance pathologies: DuelingUpgrades, FutileStall, StarvingWriter, StarvingElder, SerializedCommit, RestartConvoy, and FriendlyFire. Such pathologies degrade performance during the interaction between workload and system. Although this performance issue can be solved by hardware, the software solution remains elusive. This paper proposes a priority scheduling algorithm to remedy these performance pathologies. By contrast, the proposed approach can not only solve this issue, but also almost achieve the same performance as hardware transactional memory systems.