Using Cache Access History for Reducing False Conflicts in Signature-Based Eager Hardware Transactional Memory

Jinku Kang, Inhwan Lee

http://doi.org/

This paper proposes a method for reducing false conflicts in signature-based eager hardware transactional memory (HTM). The method tracks the information on all cache blocks that are accessed by a transaction. If the information provides evidence that there are no conflicts for a given transactional request from another core, the method prevents the occurrence of a false conflict by forcing the HTM to ignore the decision based on the signature. The method is very effective in reducing false conflicts and the associated unnecessary transaction stalls and aborts, and can be used to improve the performance of the multicore processor that implements the signature-based eager HTM. When running the STAMP benchmark on a 16-core processor that implements the LogTM-SE, the increased speed (decrease in execution time) achieved with the use of the method is 20.6% on average.