The potential for variable-granularity access tracking for optimistic parallelism

Abstract

Support for optimistic parallelism such as thread-level speculation (TLS) and transactional memory (TM) has been proposed to ease the task of parallelizing software to exploit the new abundance of multicores. A key requirement for such support is the mechanism for tracking memory accesses so that conflicts between speculative threads or transactions can be detected; existing schemes mainly track accesses at a single fixed granularity---i.e., at the word level, cache-line level, or page level. In this paper we demonstrate, for a hardware implementation of TLS and corresponding speculatively-parallelized SpecINT benchmarks, that the coarsest access tracking granularity that does not incur false violations varies significantly across applications, within applications, and across ranges of memory---from word-size to page size. These results motivate a variable-granularity approach to access tracking, and we show that such an approach can reduce the number of memory ranges that must be tracked and compared to detect conflicts can be reduced by an order of magnitude compared to word-level tracking, without increasing false violations. We are currently developing variable-granularity implementations of both a hardware-based TLS system and an STM system.