Title
Performance evaluation of thread-level speculation in off-the-shelf hardware transactional memories
Date Issued
01 January 2017
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Universidade Estadual de Campinas
Publisher(s)
Springer Verlag
Abstract
Thread-Level Speculation (TLS) is a hardware/software technique that enables the execution of multiple loop iterations in parallel, even in the presence of some loop-carried dependences. TLS requires hardware mechanisms to support conflict detection, speculative storage, in-order commit of transactions, and transaction roll-back. There is no off-the-shelf processor that provides direct support for TLS. Speculative execution is supported, however, in the form of Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM)—available in recent processors such as the Intel Core and the IBM POWER8. Earlier work has demonstrated that, in the absence of specific TLS support in commodity processors, HTM support can be used to implement TLS. This paper presents a careful evaluation of the implementation of TLS on the HTM extensions available in such machines. This evaluation provides evidence to support several important claims about the performance of TLS over HTM in the Intel Core and the IBM POWER8 architectures. Experimental results reveal that by implementing TLS on top of HTM, speed-ups of up to 3.8X can be obtained for some loops.
Start page
607
End page
621
Volume
10417 LNCS
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Informática y Ciencias de la Información
Subjects
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85028717585
ISSN of the container
03029743
ISBN of the container
9783319642024
Conference
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Source funding
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Sponsor(s)
Acknowledgments. The authors would like to thank FAPESP (grants 15/04285-5, 15/12077-3, and 13/08293-7) and the NSERC for supporting this work.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus