Implementing and evaluating nested parallel transactions in software transactional memory

Transactional Memory (TM) is a promising technique that simplifies parallel programming for shared-memory applications. To date, most TM systems have been designed to efficiently support single-level parallelism. To achieve widespread use and maximize performance gains, TM must support nested parallelism available in many applications and supported by several programming models. We present NesTM, a software TM (STM) system that supports closed-nested parallel transactions. NesTM is based on a highperformance, blocking STM that uses eager version management and word-granularity conflict detection. Its algorithm targets the state and runtime overheads of nested parallel transactions. We also describe several subtle correctness issues in supporting nested parallel transactions in NesTM and discuss their performance impact. Through our evaluation, we quantitatively analyze the performance of NesTM using STAMP applications and microbenchmarks based on concurrent data structures. First, ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: Woongki Baek, Nathan Grasso Bronson, Christos Kozyrakis, Kunle Olukotun
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, Nested Parallel Transactions, Nested Parallelism, Single-level Parallelism, SPAA 2010