HaTS: Hardware-Assisted Transaction Scheduler

In this paper we present HaTS, a Hardware-assisted Transaction Scheduler. HaTS improves performance of concurrent applications by classifying the executions of their atomic blocks (or in-memory transactions) into scheduling queues, according to their so called conflict indicators. The goal is to group those transactions that are conflicting while letting non-conflicting transactions proceed in parallel. Two core innovations characterize HaTS. First, HaTS does not assume the availability of precise information associated with incoming transactions in order to proceed with the classification. It relaxes this assumption by exploiting the inherent conflict resolution provided by Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM). Second, HaTS dynamically adjusts the number of the scheduling queues in order to capture the actual application contention level. Performance results using the STAMP benchmark suite show up to 2x improvement over state-of-the-art HTM-based scheduling techniques

Privatization-Safe Transactional Memories

Transactional memory (TM) facilitates the development of concurrent applications by letting the programmer designate certain code blocks as atomic. Programmers using a TM often would like to access the same data both inside and outside transactions, and would prefer their programs to have a strongly atomic semantics, which allows transactions to be viewed as executing atomically with respect to non-transactional accesses. Since guaranteeing such semantics for arbitrary programs is prohibitively expensive, researchers have suggested guaranteeing it only for certain data-race free (DRF) programs, particularly those that follow the privatization idiom: from some point on, threads agree that a given object can be accessed non-transactionally. In this paper we show that a variant of Transactional DRF (TDRF) by Dalessandro et al. is appropriate for a class of privatization-safe TMs, which allow using privatization idioms. We prove that, if such a TM satisfies a condition we call privatization-safe opacity and a program using the TM is TDRF under strongly atomic semantics, then the program indeed has such semantics. We also present a method for proving privatization-safe opacity that reduces proving this generalization to proving the usual opacity, and apply the method to a TM based on two-phase locking and a privatization-safe version of TL2. Finally, we establish the inherent cost of privatization-safety: we prove that a TM cannot be progressive and have invisible reads if it guarantees strongly atomic semantics for TDRF programs

Concurrence control for transactions with priorities

Priority inversion occurs when a process is delayed by the actions of another process with less priority. With atomic transactions, the concurrency control mechanism can cause delays, and without taking priorities into account can be a source of priority inversion. Three traditional concurrency control algorithms are extended so that they are free from unbounded priority inversion