Transactional memories : prototyping and simulation of hardware implementations and a characterization of the problem of contention management in software / Memorias transacionais : prototipagem e simulação de implementações em hardware e uma caracterização para o problema de gerenciamento de contenção em software

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

As parallel architectures become prevalent in the computer industry, more and more programmers are required to write parallel programs and are thus being exposed to the problems related to the use of traditional mechanisms for concurrency control. Transactional memory has been devised as a means for easing the burden of writing parallel Programs: the programmer has only to mark the sections of code that are to be executed in an atomic and isolated way - in the form of transactions, and the system takes care of the synchronization details. In this work we explore different proposals of transactional memories based on specific hardware support (HTM), developing a flexible platform for the prototyping, simulation and characterization of these systems. We also explore a transactional memory system based solely on software support (STM), devising a novel approach for managing the contention among transactions. This new approach takes into account access patterns to different data in an application when choosing the contention management strategy to be used for the access to these data. We made modifications to the STM system in order to enable the association of the data with the contention manager algorithm, and using the new implementation we characterized the STM system based on the access patterns to the data of a program, running it on different hardware. Our results show the viability of the use of transactional memories in an academic environment, and serve as a basis for the proposal of different directions to be followed in future research work, aimed at leveraging the use of transactional memories by the industry

ASSUNTO(S)

computer architecture concurrency control prototipagem rapida transactional memories rapid prototyping simulation controle de concorrencia simulação (computadores) computer memoria transacional arquitetura de computador

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