Speculative Lock Elision: Enabling Highly Concurrent Multithreaded Execution

Tuesday November 2, 2004
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:00 pm

Eric Chung
Carnegie Mellon University

Coordinating access to shared data in multiprocessing or multithreaded environments has traditionally been accomplished by serialization of threads when critical sections are encountered. While a thread acquires a lock and is executing in the critical section, other potential threads wait, which introduces an overhead.

Speculative Lock Elision is a micro-architectural technique designed to reduce lock-induced serialization and enable concurrent multi-threaded execution. Lock speculation can eliminate certain overheads by allowing threads to speculatively execute critical sections protected by the same lock.

We discuss the issues, mechanisms, and results for Speculative Lock Elision as proposed by Ravi Rajwar and James R. Goodman, and introduce a new study for the potential of deep lock speculation.

Eric Chung is a first year PhD student in the Computer Architecture Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is advised by Professor James Hoe. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Eric's research focuses on architectures and fault-tolerant computing.