Dave Christie and Jae-Woong Chung and Stephan Diestelhorst
and Michael Hohmuth and Martin Pohlack and Christof Fetzer and Martin Nowack
and Torvald Riegel and Pascal Felber and Patrick Marlier and Etienne Riviere
Abstract:
AMD's Advanced Synchronization Facility (ASF) is an x86 instruction set
extension proposal intended to simplify and speed up the
synchronization of concurrent programs. In this paper, we report our
experiences using ASF for implementing transactional memory. We have extended
a C/C++ compiler to support language-level transactions and generate
code that takes advantage of ASF. We use a software fallback mechanism for
transactions that cannot be committed within ASF (e.g., because of hardware
capacity limitations). Our evaluation uses a cycle-accurate x86 simulator
that we have extended with ASF support. Building a complete ASF-based software
stack allows us to evaluate the performance gains that a user-level program
can obtain from ASF. Our measurements on a wide range of benchmarks indicate
that the overheads traditionally associated with software transactional
memories can be significantly reduced with the help of ASF.
Published:
"Evaluation of AMD's Advanced Synchronization
Facility within a Complete Transactional Memory Stack"
Dave Christie and Jae-Woong Chung and Stephan Diestelhorst
and Michael Hohmuth and Martin Pohlack and Christof Fetzer and Martin Nowack
and Torvald Riegel and Pascal Felber and Patrick Marlier and Etienne Riviere
Proc. of the 5th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems
, Paris, France, April 2010.
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