A Study of Factors External to Software Transactional Memories that Affect their Speed-up

Abstract

This project seeks a characterization of factors external to software transactional memories (STM) that may affect their performance (speed-up). The characterization can help the researchers community to settle down once and for all whether or not a particular selection of kernel parameters has a significative effect on the results reported by the benchmarks. In this project we use three benchmarks—STAMP, STMBench7, and eigenBench—to assess the behaviour of two STMs—TinySTM and SwissSTM—when external factors, de- rived from different operating system features, are switched on and off in a series of experiments. The external factors are turned on and off by changing parameters of the process manager (scheduler), memory manager, and by binding the TM implementations to different thread libraries.