Abstract
Speculation with transactional memory systems helps programmers and compilers produce profitable thread-level parallel programs. Prior work shows that supporting transactions that can span multiple threads, rather than requiring transactions be contained within a single thread, enables new types of speculative parallelization techniques for both programmers and parallelizing compilers. Unfortunately, software support for multi-threaded transactions (MTXs) comes with significant additional inter-thread communication overhead for speculation validation. This overhead can make otherwise good parallelization unprofitable for programs with sizeable read and write sets. Some programs using these prior software MTXs overcame this problem through significant efforts by expert programmers to minimize these sets and optimize communication, capabilities which compiler technology has been unable to equivalently achieve. Instead, this paper makes speculative parallelization less laborious and more feasible through low-overhead speculation validation, presenting the first complete design, implementation, and evaluation of hardware MTXs. Even with maximal speculation validation of every load and store inside transactions of tens to hundreds of millions of instructions, profitable parallelization of complex programs can be achieved. Across 8 benchmarks, this system achieves a geomean speedup of 99% over sequential execution on a multicore machine with 4 cores.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2018 |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
Pages | 15-29 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Volume | 53 |
Edition | 2 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450349116 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 19 2018 |
Event | 23rd International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2018 - Williamsburg, United States Duration: Mar 24 2018 → Mar 28 2018 |
Other
Other | 23rd International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, ASPLOS 2018 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | Williamsburg |
Period | 3/24/18 → 3/28/18 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- General Computer Science
Keywords
- Hardware transactional memory
- Multithreaded transactions
- Pipelined parallelism
- Thread-level speculation