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Modeling transactional memory workload performance

Published:09 January 2010Publication History
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Abstract

Transactional memory promises to make parallel programming easier than with fine-grained locking, while performing just as well. This performance claim is not always borne out because an application may violate a common-case assumption of the TM designer or because of external system effects. In order to help programmers assess the suitability of their code for transactional memory, this work introduces a formal model of transactional memory as well as a tool, called Syncchar. Syncchar can predict the speedup of a conversion from locks to transactions within 25% for the STAMP benchmarks. Because getting good performance from transactions is more difficult than commonly appreciated, developers need tools to tune transactional performance.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
        ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 45, Issue 5
        PPoPP '10
        May 2010
        346 pages
        ISSN:0362-1340
        EISSN:1558-1160
        DOI:10.1145/1837853
        Issue’s Table of Contents
        • cover image ACM Conferences
          PPoPP '10: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming
          January 2010
          372 pages
          ISBN:9781605588773
          DOI:10.1145/1693453

        Copyright © 2010 Copyright held by author(s).

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 9 January 2010

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