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Sun Labs - New Technical Report - Early Experience with a Commercial Hardware Transactional Memory Implementation

New Sun Labs Technical Report:

Early Experience with a Commercial Hardware Transactional Memory Implementation

by Dave Dice, Yossi Lev, Mark Moir, Dan Nussbaum, and Marek Olszewski

Read Technical Report
» TR-2009-180
October 26, 2009 - As multicore systems become mainstream, it is increasingly important to put effective concurrent programming within reach of everyday programmers. Transactional Memory (TM) is a promising technology that can help. TM allows programmers to specify that a block of code should execute without interference from concurrent threads, without writing the synchronization code to achieve this, which can be hard to write, understand, and maintain, and is subject to difficult tradeoffs.

We report on our experience with the hardware transactional memory (HTM) feature of two revisions of a prototype multicore processor built at Sun. Our experience includes a number of promising results using HTM to improve performance in a variety of contexts, showing that Sun's architects have made groundbreaking progress towards sophisticated synchronization support for multicore systems.

However, we also faced a number of challenges in using this feature. Our report includes lessons learned about how to more effectively use the feature, as well as identifying ways in which future HTM features can improve on it. Thus, we hope our experience will be useful both to programmers who use the feature and to designers of future similar features.