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Leveraging irrevocability to deal with signature saturation in hardware transactional memory

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Abstract

In hardware transactional memory, signatures have been proposed to keep track of memory locations accessed in a transaction to help conflict detection. Generally, signatures are implemented as Bloom filters that suffer from aliasing, that is, they can give rise to false conflicts. Such conflicts are more likely as signature fills (saturation), and they can lead a parallel application to perform worse than its serial version. Irrevocability is analyzed to address the signature saturation problem. When a transaction reaches a saturation threshold, the transaction enters an irrevocable state that prevents it from being aborted. Hence, such a transaction keeps running while the others are either stalled or allowed to run concurrently. We propose an analytical model that shows this is a good solution to overcome a high contention scenario. In addition, experimental evaluation shows the benefits in performance and power consumption of the proposed irrevocability mechanisms. Different saturation metrics are considered and a fixed threshold is found that yields maximum performance for the benchmarks evaluated.

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Notes

  1. In this case, the queues of the network interconnect routers arbitrate which irrevocability request packet is enqueued first, whose owner will be granted irrevocability in the form of a token (see Sect. 3.4).

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Government of Spain, under project TIN2013-42253-P, and Junta de Andalucía, under project P12-TIC-1470.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Architecture, University of Malaga, 29071, Málaga, Spain

    Ricardo Quislant, Eladio Gutierrez, Emilio L. Zapata & Oscar Plata

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  1. Ricardo Quislant
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Correspondence to Ricardo Quislant.

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Quislant, R., Gutierrez, E., Zapata, E.L. et al. Leveraging irrevocability to deal with signature saturation in hardware transactional memory. J Supercomput 73, 2525–2557 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1944-z

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