Adaptive Transactional Memories: Performance and Energy Consumption Tradeoffs

Energy efficiency is becoming a pressing issue, especially in large data centers where it entails, at the same time, a non-negligible management cost, an enhancement of hardware fault probability, and a significant environmental footprint. In this paper, we study how Software Transactional Memories (STM) can provide benefits on both power saving and the overall applications’ execution performance. This is related to the fact that encapsulating shared-data accesses within transactions gives the freedom to the STM middleware to both ensure consistency and reduce the actual data contention, the latter having been shown to affect the overall power needed to complete the application’s execution. We have selected a set of self-adaptive extensions to existing STM middlewares (namely, TinySTM and R-STM) to prove how self-adapting computation can capture the actual degree of parallelism and/or logical contention on shared data in a better way, enhancing even more the intrinsic benefits provided by STM. Of course, this benefit comes at a cost, which is the actual execution time required by the proposed approaches to precisely tune the execution parameters for reducing power consumption and enhancing execution performance. Nevertheless, the results hereby provided show that adaptivity is a strictly necessary requirement to reduce energy consumption in STM systems: Without it, it is not possible to reach any acceptable level of energy efficiency at all

ERIS live: A NUMA-aware in-memory storage engine for tera-scale multiprocessor systems

The ever-growing demand for more computing power forces hardware vendors to put an increasing number of multiprocessors into a single server system, which usually exhibits a non-uniform memory access (NUMA). In-memory database systems running on NUMA platforms face several issues such as the increased latency and the decreased bandwidth when accessing remote main memory. To cope with these NUMA-related issues, a DBMS has to allow flexible data partitioning and data placement at runtime. In this demonstration, we present ERIS, our NUMA-aware in-memory storage engine. ERIS uses an adaptive partitioning approach that exploits the topology of the underlying NUMA platform and significantly reduces NUMA-related issues. We demonstrate throughput numbers and hardware performance counter evaluations of ERIS and a NUMA-unaware index for different workloads and configurations. All experiments are conducted on a standard server system as well as on a system consisting of 64 multiprocessors, 512 cores, and 8 TBs main memory

Process algebra approach to parallel DBMS performance modelling

Abstract unavailable please refer to PD