ATLAS: A Scalable Emulator for Transactional Parallel Systems

With uniprocessor systems running into instruction-level parallelism (ILP) limits and fundamental VLSI constraints, multiprocessor architectures provide a realistic path towards scalable performance. Nevertheless, the key factors limiting the potential of multiprocessor systems are the difficulty of parallel application development and the hardware complexity of large-scale systems. Several groups have recently proposed parallel software and hardware based on the concept of transactions as a novel approach for addressing the problems of multiprocessor systems [16]. Transactions have the potential to simplify parallel programming by eliminating the need for manual orchestration of parallel tasks using locks and messages [5]. Transactions have the potential to improve parallel hardware by allowing for speculative parallelism and increasing the granularity of the coherence and consistency protocols [4].