An integrated hardware-software approach to flexible transactional memory

There has been considerable recent interest in the support of transactional memory (TM) in both hardware and software. We present an intermediate approach, in which hardware is used to accelerate a TM implementation controlled fundamentally by software. Our hardware support reduces the overhead of common TM tasks, namely, conflict detection and data isolation, for bounded transactions. Software control allows policy flexibility for conflict detection, contention management, and data granularity, in addition to enabling transactions unbounded in space and time. Our hardware consists of 1) an alert-on-update mechanism for fast eventbased communication, used for software-controlled conflict detection; and 2) support for programmable data isolation, allowing multiple concurrent transactional readers and writers at the software’s behest, along with fast data commit and abort support (using only a few cycles of completely local operation). Our results show that for common-case bounded...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Arrvindh Shriraman, Michael F. Spear, Hemayet Hossain, Virendra J. Marathe, Sandhya Dwarkadas, Michael L. Scott
• Keywords: Conflict Detection, Hardware, Hardware Support, ISCA 2007