Thread-Level Transactional Memory
Kevin E. Moore, Mark D. Hill, David A. Wood
2005
This paper presents thread-level transactional memory (TTM), a memory system interface that separates the semantics of transactions-atomicity, consistency, and isolation-from the implementation. By making transactions a thread-level abstraction, TTM permits implementations using different combinations of of high-level software, low-level software, and dedicated hardware. TTM tracks a transaction's read and write sets and creates a "before-image" log in the thread's virtual address space. We evaluate four TTM implementations-broadcast and directory coherence times two different transaction abort mechanisms-using full-system simulation. Like previous transactional memory systems, TTM implementations are competitive with or better than lock-based synchronization. TTM's ability to cache the before and after images both supports large transactions and enables low memory bandwidth on successful commits and fast rollback on aborts.
Download this report (PDF)
Return to tech report index
|