On designing NUMA-aware concurrency control for scalable transactional memory

Abstract

NUMA architectures posed the challenge of rethinking parallel applications due to the non-homogeneity introduced by their design, and their real benefits are limited to the characteristics of the particular workload. We name as partitionable transactional workloads such workloads that may be able to exploit the distributed nature of NUMA, such as transactional workloads where data and accesses can be easily partitioned among the so called NUMA zones. However, in case those workloads require the synchronization on shared data, we have to face the issue of exploiting the NUMA architecture also in the concurrency control for their transactions. Therefore in this paper we present a NUMA-aware concurrency control for transactional memory that we designed for promoting scalability in scenarios where both the transactional workload is prone to scale, and the characteristics of the underlying memory model are inherently non-uniform, such as NUMA architectures.