Between All and Nothing -- Versatile Aborts in Hardware Transactional Memory

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) implementations are becoming available in commercial, off-the-shelf components. While generally comparable, some implementations deviate from the strict all-or-nothing property of pure Transactional Memory. We analyse these deviations and find that with small modifications, they can be used to accelerate and simplify both transactional and non-transactional programming constructs. At the heart of our extensions we enable access to the transaction's full register state in the abort handler in an existing HTM without extending the architectural register state. Access to the full register state enables applications in both transactional and non-transactional parallel programming: hybrid transactional memory; transactional escape actions; transactional suspend/resume; and alert-on-update.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTRANSACT 15
Place of PublicationHouston, TX, USA
PublisherACM New York, NY, USA
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2015
Peer-reviewedYes

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

DFG Classification of Subject Areas according to Review Boards

Keywords

  • computer architecture, synchronisation, transactional memory, cross thread communication