Compiler and runtime techniques for software transactional memory optimization

Software transactional memory (STM) systems are an attractive environment to evaluate optimistic concurrency. We describe our experience of supporting and optimizing an STM system at both the managed runtime and compiler levels. We describe the design policies of our STM system and the statistics collected by the runtime to identify performance bottlenecks and guide tuning decisions. We present an initial work on supporting automatic instrumentation of the STM primitives for C/C++ and Java programs in the IBM XL compiler and J9 Java virtual machine. We evaluate and discuss the performance of several transactional programs running on our system. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.