Techniques for improving the performance of software transactional memory

Abstract

Transactional Memory (TM) gives software developers the opportunity to write concurrent programs more easily compared to any previous programming paradigms and gives a performance comparable to lock-based synchronizations. Current Software TM (STM) implementations have performance overheads that can be reduced by introducing new abstractions in Transactional Memory programming model. In this thesis we present four new techniques for improving the performance of Software TM: (i) Abstract Nested Transactions (ANT), (ii) TagTM, (iii) profile-guided transaction coalescing, and (iv) dynamic transaction coalescing. ANT improves performance of transactional applications without breaking the semantics of the transactional paradigm, TagTM speeds up accesses to transactional meta-data, profile-guided transaction coalescing lowers transactional overheads at compile time, and dynamic transaction coalescing lowers transactional overheads at runtime. Our analysis shows that Abstract Nested Transactions, TagTM, profile-guided transaction coalescing, and dynamic transaction coalescing improve the performance of the original programs that use Software Transactional Memory.