Optimizing the Concurrent Execution of Locks and Transactions

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising alternative to mutual exclusion. In spite of this, it may be unrealistic for TM programs to be devoid of locks due to their abundant use in legacy software systems. Consequently, for TMs to be practical they may need to manage the interaction of transactions...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLanguages and Compilers for Parallel Computing pp. 124 - 140
Main Authors Gottschlich, Justin E., Chung, JaeWoong
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Subjects
Atomic Block
Concurrent Execution
Critical Section
Mutual Exclusion
Transactional Memory
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Summary:Transactional memory (TM) is a promising alternative to mutual exclusion. In spite of this, it may be unrealistic for TM programs to be devoid of locks due to their abundant use in legacy software systems. Consequently, for TMs to be practical they may need to manage the interaction of transactions and locks when they access the same shared-memory. This paper presents two algorithms, one coarse-grained and one fine-grained, that improve the state-of-the-art performance for TMs that support the concurrent execution of locks and transactions. We also discuss the programming language constructs that are necessary to implement such algorithms and present analyses that compare and contrast our approach with prior work. Our analyses demonstrate that, (i) in general, our proposed coarse- and fine-grained algorithms improve program concurrency but (ii) an algorithm’s concurrent throughput potential does not always lead to realized performance gains.
ISBN:9783642360350
3642360351
ISSN:0302-9743
1611-3349
DOI:10.1007/978-3-642-36036-7_9