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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

Email: amohtasham@gsd.inesc-id.pt

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Multicore revolution

• Chip-multiprocessors are mainstream hardware

• We must effectively program these systems

Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory January 22nd, 2014

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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 Memory January 22nd, 2014

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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

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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

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A typical STM read operation

Amin MohtashamExploiting 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

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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?

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A naïve approach: Direct read operations

Amin MohtashamExploiting 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

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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

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A more sophisticated approach:Using page protection bits

Page TablePhysical Memory

Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory Amin Mohtasham

PageBaseAddress Read Write

0x2FF8000 1 1

Thread#2Thread#1

write(X)

read(X)

TX1

TX2

0 0

read(X)

blockedblocked

0x2FF8000 X=10X=99

For a given page, how can we give different permissions to different threads?

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Mapped memory

• By using memory map functions, we can define different virtual memory regions with different protection levels

Amin MohtashamExploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory

Page TablePhysical Memory

PageBaseAddress Read Write

0x2FF8000

0x2FF8000

0x2FF8000

0 0

1 1

Thread#1 Thread#2

read(X)

read(X)

X=10

[Abadi et al., ACM PPOPP’09]

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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

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PGSTM’s Memory Model

Amin MohtashamExploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory

Page Table Physical 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

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PGSTM in action

Amin MohtashamExploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory

Page TablePhysical Memory PageBaseAddress Read Write

0x2FF8000 1 1

0x2FF8000 X=10

Thread#2Thread#1

write(X)

read(X)

TX1

TX2

read(X)

0x2FF8000 1 1

0 0

blockedX=99

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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 MohtashamExploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory

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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

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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 MohtashamExploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Exploiting Off-the-Shelf Virtual Memory Mechanisms to Boost Software Transactional Memory

Thank you!

Amin Mohtasham