technology from seed Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham, Paulo Ferreira and João Barreto Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed Multicore revolution Chip-multiprocessors are mainstream hardware We must effectively program these systems Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional MemoryJanuary 22nd, 2014

technology from seed Lock-based methods Parallel Programming with traditional locks is difficult There is a trade-off between complexity and performance Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional MemoryJanuary 22nd, 2014

technology from seed Software Transactional Memory Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham Software Transactional Memory is: –Easy to use –Portable –Not limited by hardware capacity

technology from seed The dark side of STM STM has more sequential overhead than HTM How can we alleviate this overhead? Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed A typical STM read operation Amin Mohtasham Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Physical Memory Thread#1 X=10 readTx(X) read(X) if isConsistent() then here comes the overhead

technology from seed Our objective Most transactional workloads are Read-Dominated Most of the read operations are consistent –Validation is a waste of work for consistent reads Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham Can we actually read directly from memory and avoid the validation?

technology from seed A naïve approach: Direct read operations Amin Mohtasham Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Physical Memory Thread#1 X=10 read(X) Thread#2 write(X) read(X) TX1 TX2 TX3 Is there any safe way to read directly from memory? Inconsistent X=99

technology from seed An interrupt by hardware! Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Process Virtual Memory MMU is a common component of commodity hardware By relying on the page-level mechanisms in MMU, we can prevent threads from accessing a memory page Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed A more sophisticated approach: Using page protection bits Page Table Physical Memory Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham PageBaseAddress ReadWrite 0x2FF Thread#2 Thread#1 write(X) read(X) TX1 TX2 00 read(X) blocked 0x2FF8000 X=10 X=99 For a given page, how can we give different permissions to different threads?

technology from seed Mapped memory By using memory map functions, we can define different virtual memory regions with different protection levels Amin Mohtasham Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Page Table Physical Memory PageBaseAddress ReadWrite 0x2FF Thread#1Thread#2 read(X) X=10 [Abadi et al., ACM PPOPP’09]

technology from seed Proof of concept: PGSTM At most, one writer transaction at each time –Using a single global lock Multiple read-only transactions can at each time Read-only transactions can execute in parallel, as long as they do not read from pages being written Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed PGSTM’s Memory Model Amin Mohtasham Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Page TablePhysical Memory Shared Data Read-only region Read/Write region Two different virtual memory regions pointed at same physical memory pages Read-only Region contains either read-only or inaccessible pages In Read/Write region all pages are accessible and updatable

technology from seed PGSTM in action Amin Mohtasham Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Page Table Physical Memory PageBaseAddress ReadWrite 0x2FF X=10 Thread#2 Thread#1 write(X) read(X) TX1 TX2 read(X) 0x2FF blocked X=99

technology from seed When to unlock a page? Can we unlock the page when the writer commits? –It is not safe if there are other active read-only transactions running Unlock only after such active transactions complete Amin Mohtasham Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory

technology from seed Evaluation environment List look-up benchmark Read-only transactions search for a random element Read/Write transactions modify a random element We compare our results with TML [ Dalessandro et al.,Europar’10 ] Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed TML: Transactional Mutex Locks At most, one writer transaction at each time –Using a single global lock Read-only transactions can not run in parallel with the writer transaction With the lowest sequential overhead Amin Mohtasham Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory

technology from seed Evaluation: Different contentions Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Throughput for different contention levels [64 threads, 10% write-load] Amin Mohtasham Less contention

technology from seed Evaluation: Scalability Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Throughput for different number of concurrent threads [2MB List, 10% write-load] Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed Evaluation: Different write loads Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Throughput for different write loads [2MB List, 64 threads] Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed Conclusion Using MMU with STMs can lower their sequential overhead We proposed PGTSM as proof of concept PGSTM outperforms TML in low contention scenarios Our preliminary results are promising Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed Future works Evaluating with non-trivial benchmarks Supporting multiple writers Using finer grained conflict detection Upgrading to a generic accelerator layer that runs on top of any STM Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham

technology from seed Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Thank you! Amin Mohtasham