1. Software Support and Evaluation of Hardware Transactional Memory on Blue Gene/Q
- Author
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Maged M. Michael, Raul E. Silvera, Peng Wu, José Nelson Amaral, Amy Wang, Martin Ohmacht, Christopher Barton, and Matthew Gaudet
- Subjects
business.industry ,Computer science ,Transactional memory ,Parallel computing ,computer.software_genre ,Theoretical Computer Science ,Instruction set ,Runtime system ,Software ,Computational Theory and Mathematics ,Hardware and Architecture ,Scalability ,Operating system ,Programming paradigm ,Benchmark (computing) ,Compiler ,business ,computer - Abstract
This paper describes an end-to-end system implementation of a transactional memory (TM) programming model on top of the hardware transactional memory (HTM) of the Blue Gene/Q machine. The TM programming model supports most C/C++ programming constructs using a best-effort HTM and the help of a complete software stack including the compiler, the kernel, and the TM runtime. An extensive evaluation of the STAMP and the RMS-TM benchmark suites on BG/Q is the first of its kind in understanding characteristics of running TM workloads on real hardware TM. The study reveals several interesting insights on the overhead and the scalability of BG/Q HTM with respect to sequential execution, coarse-grain locking, and software TM.
- Published
- 2015
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