Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics School of Computer Science and Technology Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

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Abstract— As one of the most potential solution to improve thread level parallelism and reduce most ordinary programmers’ burden on parallel programming, transactional memory (TM) systems have attracted a great deal of attention from both industry and academic since the notion was proposed in 1993. Since then, various designs and implementations are proposed to improve the performance while reducing the overheads. However, recent investigations of the high-contention and coarse-grained workloads reveal various pathologies that will offset the performance benefits. In this paper, we analysis the advantages and disadvantages of existing conflict management and version management schemes, make a case study in the interplay of them to learn its impact on performance. In particular, we apply a runtime environment to recognize application’s dynamic behaviors and resolve transactional conflicts to make up the gap between the upper layer application’s diversity and the underline hardware’s capability. Throughout the comprehensive evaluation, we find that our proposal can obtain a significant performance improvement across the applications selected from the STAMP benchmark suite on DynTM, which is regarded as one of the latest progress in HTM systems.

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Cite: Zhichao Yan, Dan Feng, and Yujuan Tan, " Using A Runtime to Overcome The Pathologies in Hardware Transactional Memory Systems," Journal of Computers vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 18-26, 2013.