Unbounded Transactional Memory

Tuesday April 12, 2005
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:00 pm

Vasilis Liaskovitis
Carnegie Mellon University

Transactional execution is an attractive alternative to conventional multithreaded execution. Most hardware mechanisms proposed for transactional execution limit the memory footprint of a transaction to the size of a hardware structure, either a speculative buffer or the cache hierarchy itself. This prohibits transactions of large sizes to be used. This paper from HPCA 2005 proposes a simple mechanism that enables a transaction's footprint to approach the size of the available physical memory. The authors generalize their design to accommodate transactions of unbounded size and duration. The paper argues that although most programs are characterized by transactions of small footprints, certain applications exhibit transactions of large sizes and therefore can benefit from a generic unbounded transactional mechanism.

In this talk, I will briefly go over other proposed transactional schemes, review the contributions of the paper and discuss the need for transactional execution.

Vasilis Liaskovitis is a first year graduate student in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is advised by Babak Falsafi. He received his B.S degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. His research interests include computer architecture, multiprocessor systems, novel compilation techniques and pattern recognition algorithms.