Implementation of unified signatures for transactional memory systems

Abstract

Hardware signatures have been used for detecting conflicts in Transactional Memory (TM) systems. Even with its area-efficiency, a signature can degrade TM performance by falsely detecting conflicts. Hence, increasing the accuracy of signatures with limited hardware resources is a crucial issue. We propose a simple and efficient signature design, unified signature. Instead of using separate read- and write-signatures, we implement a single signature to track all read- and write-accesses, effectively enlarging the signature size without additional overhead. Our results show that a TM system with a 4K-bit blind unified signature achieves average speedups of 8% over baseline TM systems with 38% less power and 17% less area.