A Waiting Mechanism with Conflict Prediction on Hardware Transactional Memory

Abstract

Lock-based thread synchronization techniques have been commonly used in parallel programming on multi-core processors. However, lock can cause deadlocks and poor scalabilites, and Transactional Memory (TM) has been proposed and studied for lock-free synchronization. On TMs, transactions are executed speculatively in parallel as long as they do not encounter any conflicts on shared variables. On general HTMs: hardware implementations of TM, transactions which have conflicted once each other will conflict repeatedly if they will be executed again in parallel, and the performance of HTM will decline. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a conflict prediction to avoid conflicts before executing transactions, considering historical data of conflicts. The result of the experiment shows that the execution time of HTM is reduced 59.2% at a maximum, and 16.8% on average with 16 threads.