Code Generation and Optimization for Transactional Memory Constructs in an Unmanaged Language

Abstract

Transactional memory offers significant advantages for concurrency control compared to locks. This paper presents the design and implementation of transactional memory constructs in an unmanaged language. Unmanaged languages pose a unique set of challenges to transactional memory constructs - for example, lack of type and memory safety, use of function pointers, aliasing of local variables, and others. This paper describes novel compiler and runtime mechanisms that address these challenges and optimize the performance of transactions in an unmanaged environment. We have implemented these mechanisms in a production-quality C compiler and a high-performance software transactional memory runtime. We measure the effectiveness of these optimizations and compare the performance of lock-based versus transaction-based programming on a set of concurrent data structures and the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite. On a 16 processor SMP system, the transaction-based version of the SPLASH-2 benchmarks scales much better than the coarse-grain locking version and performs comparably to the fine-grain locking version. Compiler optimizations significantly reduce the overheads of transactional memory so that, on a single thread, the transaction-based version incurs only about 6.4% overhead compared to the lock-based version for the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite. Thus, our system is the first to demonstrate that transactions integrate well with an unmanaged language, and can perform as well as fine-grain locking while providing the programming ease of coarse-grain locking even on an unmanaged environment