Evaluation of AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility within a Complete Transactional Memory Stack
Dave Christie, Jae-Woong Chung, Stephan Diestelhorst, Michael Hohmuth, Martin Pohlack, Christof Fetzer, Martin Nowack, Torvald Riegel, Pascal Felber, Patrick Marlier & Etienne Rivière
| Résumé |
AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) is an x86 instruction
set extension proposal intended to simplify and speed up the
synchronization of concurrent programs. In this paper, we report
our experiences using ASF for implementing transactional memory. We
have extended a C/C++ compiler to support language-level
transactions and generate code that takes advantage of ASF. We use
a software fallback mechanism for transactions that cannot be
committed within ASF (e.g., because of hardware capacity
limitations). Our evaluation uses a cycle-accurate x86 simulator
that we have extended with ASF support. Building a complete
ASF-based software stack allows us to evaluate the performance
gains that a user-level program can obtain from ASF. Our
measurements on a wide range of benchmarks indicate that the
overheads traditionally associated with software transactional
memories can be significantly reduced with the help of ASF. |
| Mots-clés |
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| Citation | D. Christie, et al., "Evaluation of AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility within a Complete Transactional Memory Stack," in Proceedings of EuroSys 2010: 5th European conference on Computer systems, Paris, France, 2010, p. 27-40. |
| Type | Actes de congrès (Anglais) |
| Nom de la conférence | Proceedings of EuroSys 2010: 5th European conference on Computer systems (Paris, France) |
| Date de la conférence | 13-4-2010 |
| Pages | 27-40 |
| Liée au projet | VELOX: An Integrated Approach to Transactional Memory on ... |