A Dynamic Instrumentation Approach to Software Transactional Memory

A Dynamic Instrumentation Approach to Software Transactional Memory Marek Olszewski Master of Applied Science Graduate Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Toronto 2007 With the advent of chip-multiprocessors, we are faced with the challenge of parallelizing performance-critical software. Transactional memory has been proposed as a promising programming model, with software transactional memory (STM) being especially compelling for today’s use. However, in addition to high overheads, existing STMs are limited to either managed languages or intrusive APIs. Furthermore, transactions in STMs cannot normally contain calls to unobservable code such as shared libraries or system calls. In this dissertation we present JudoSTM, a novel dynamic binary-rewriting approach to implementing STM that supports C and C++ code. By using value-based conflict detection, JudoSTM additionally supports the transactional execution of both (i) irreversible system calls and (ii) code that contains locks. We lower overhead through several novel optimizations that improve invisible-reader and validate/commit performance. We show that our approach performs comparably to RSTM—demonstrating that a dynamic binary-rewriting approach to implementing STM is an interesting alternative.