Adaptive thread scheduling techniques for improving scalability of software transactional memory

Abstract

Software transactional memory (STM) enhances both ease-of-use and concurrency, and is considered state-of-the-art for parallel applications to scale on modern multi-core hardware. However, there are certain situations where STM performs even worse than traditional locks. Upon hotspots where most threads contend over a few pieces of shared data, going transactional will result in excessive conflicts and aborts that adversely degrade performance. We present a new design of adaptive thread scheduler that manages concurrency when the system is about entering and leaving hotspots. The scheduler controls the number of threads spawning new transactions according to the live commit throughput. We implemented two feedback-control policies called Throttle and Probe to realize this adaptive scheduling. Performance evaluation with the STAMP benchmarks shows that enabling Throttle and Probe obtain best-case speedups of 87.5% and 108.7% respectively.