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A runtime system for software lock elision

Authors:

Tim HarrisAuthors Info & Claims

EuroSys '09: Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems

Pages 261 - 274

https://doi.org/10.1145/1519065.1519094

Published: 01 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The advent of multi-core processors means that exploiting parallelism is key to increasing the performance of programs. Many researchers have studied the use of atomic blocks as a way to simplify the construction of scalable parallel programs. However, there is a large body of existing lock-based code, and typically it is incorrect to simply replace lock-based critical sections with atomic blocks. Some problems include the need to do IO within critical sections; the use of primitives such as condition variables; and the sometime reliance on underlying lock properties such as fairness or priority inheritance.

In this paper we investigate an alternative: a software runtime system that allows threads to speculatively execute lock-based critical sections in parallel. Execution proceeds optimistically, dynamically detecting conflicts between accesses by concurrent threads. However, if there are frequent conflicts, or if there are attempts to perform operations that cannot be done speculatively, then execution can fall back to acquiring a lock. Conversely, implementations of atomic blocks must typically serialise all operations that cannot be performed speculatively.

Our runtime system has been designed with the requirements of systems code in mind: in particular it does not require that programs be written in type-safe languages, nor does it require any form of garbage collection. Furthermore, we never require a thread holding a lock to wait for a thread that has speculatively acquired it. This lets us retain any useful underlying properties of a given lock implementation, e.g. fairness or priority inheritance.

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Cited By

Sheng YHassan ASpear M(2023)Separating Mechanism from Policy in STM2023 32nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT)10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00031(279-296)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00031
Yu TPradel M(2018)Pinpointing and repairing performance bottlenecks in concurrent programsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-017-9578-123:5(3034-3071)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-017-9578-1
Sengupta ACao MBond MKulkarni MReddi VSmith ATang L(2017)Legato: end-to-end bounded region serializability using commodity hardware transactional memoryProceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/3049832.3049834(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3049832.3049834
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Index Terms

A runtime system for software lock elision
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Concurrent computing methodologies
    1. Concurrent programming languages
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Concurrent programming languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

EuroSys '09: Proceedings of the 4th ACM European conference on Computer systems

April 2009

342 pages

ISBN:9781605584829

DOI:10.1145/1519065

General Chair:
Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat
FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany
,
Program Chairs:
John Wilkes
Google, Inc., USA
,
Rebecca Isaacs
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 April 2009

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EuroSys '09

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EuroSys '09: Fourth EuroSys Conference 2009

April 1 - 3, 2009

Nuremberg, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 241 of 1,308 submissions, 18%

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Cited By

Sheng YHassan ASpear M(2023)Separating Mechanism from Policy in STM2023 32nd International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT)10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00031(279-296)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/PACT58117.2023.00031
Yu TPradel M(2018)Pinpointing and repairing performance bottlenecks in concurrent programsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-017-9578-123:5(3034-3071)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-017-9578-1
Sengupta ACao MBond MKulkarni MReddi VSmith ATang L(2017)Legato: end-to-end bounded region serializability using commodity hardware transactional memoryProceedings of the 2017 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.5555/3049832.3049834(1-13)Online publication date: 4-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3049832.3049834
Zheng LLiao XJin HLiu H(2017)Exploiting the Parallelism Between Conflicting Critical Sections with Partial ReversionIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2017.272748528:12(3443-3457)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/TPDS.2017.2727485
Sousa GBaldassin A(2017)FGSCM: A Fine-Grained Approach to Transactional Lock Elision2017 29th International Symposium on Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing (SBAC-PAD)10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2017.22(113-120)Online publication date: Oct-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2017.22
Sengupta ACao MBond MKulkarni M(2017)Legato: End-to-end bounded region serializability using commodity hardware transactional memory2017 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO)10.1109/CGO.2017.7863724(1-13)Online publication date: Feb-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/CGO.2017.7863724
Guerraoui RTrigonakis V(2016)Optimistic concurrency with OPTIKACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3016078.285114651:8(1-12)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3016078.2851146
Antić JChatzopoulos GGuerraoui RTrigonakis V(2016)Locking Made EasyProceedings of the 17th International Middleware Conference10.1145/2988336.2988357(1-14)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2988336.2988357
Estebanez ALlanos DGonzalez-Escribano A(2016)A Survey on Thread-Level Speculation TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/293836949:2(1-39)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2938369
Yu TPradel MZeller ARoychoudhury A(2016)SyncProf: detecting, localizing, and optimizing synchronization bottlenecksProceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/2931037.2931070(389-400)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2931037.2931070
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