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International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing

ICA3PP 2011: Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing pp 326–337Cite as

STM with Transparent API Considered Harmful

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 7016))

Abstract

One of the key selling points of Software Transactional Memory (STM) systems is that they simplify the development of concurrent programs, because programmers do not have to be concerned with which objects are accessed concurrently. Instead, they just have to say which operations are to be executed atomically. Yet, one of the consequences of making an STM completely transparent to the programmer is that it may incur in large overheads.

In this paper, we describe a port to Java of the WormBench benchmark, and use it to explore the effects on performance of relaxing the transparency of an STM. To that end, we implemented, in a well known STM framework (Deuce), a couple of annotations that allow programmers to specify that certain objects or fields of objects should not be transactified. Our results show that we get an improvement of up to 22-fold in the performance of the benchmark when we tell the STM framework which data is not transactional, and that the performance of the improved version is as good as or better than a fine-grained lock-based approach.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DEETC, ISEL, Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon, Portugal

    Fernando Miguel Carvalho

  2. INESC-ID, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

    Fernando Miguel Carvalho & Joao Cachopo

Authors
  1. Fernando Miguel Carvalho
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  2. Joao Cachopo
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Melbourne Burwood Campus, 221 Burwood Highway, 3125,, Burwood, VIC, Australia

    Yang Xiang

  2. ICAR-CNR and University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci 41 C, 87036, Rende (CS), Italy

    Alfredo Cuzzocrea

  3. School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Geelong Waurn Ponds Campus, Pigdons Road, 3217, Geelong, VIC, Australia

    Michael Hobbs

  4. School of Information Technology, Deakin University, Melbourne Burwood Campus, 221 Burwood Highway, 3125, Burwood, VIC, Australia

    Wanlei Zhou

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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Carvalho, F.M., Cachopo, J. (2011). STM with Transparent API Considered Harmful. In: Xiang, Y., Cuzzocrea, A., Hobbs, M., Zhou, W. (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7016. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24650-0_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24650-0_28

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24649-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24650-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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