Improving Transactional Memory Performance For Irregular Applications

Transactional memory (TM) offers optimistic concurrency support in modern multicore architectures, helping the programmers to extract parallelism when data dependence information is not statically available. This work presents ReduxSTM, a software TM system especially designed to extract parallelism from irregular applications. Commit management and conflict detection are tailored to take advantage of both, sequential transaction ordering to assure correct results, and privatization of reduction patterns, a very frequent memory access pattern in irregular applications. Both techniques are used to avoid unnecessary transaction aborts.