Extensible transactional memory testbed
Transactional Memory (TM) is a promising abstraction as it hides all synchronization complexities from the programmers of concurrent applications. More particularly, the TM paradigm operated a complexity shift from the application programming to the TM programming. Therefore, expert programmers have now started to look for the ideal TM that will bring, once-for-all, performance to all concurrent applications. Researchers have recently identified numerous issues TMs may suffer from. Surprisingly, no TMs have ever been tested in these scenarios. In this paper, we present the first to date TM testbed. We propose a framework, TMUNIT, that provides a domain specific language to write rapidly TM workloads so that our test-suite is easily extensible. Our reproducible semantic tests indicate through reproducible counter-examples that existing TMs do not satisfy recent consistency criteria. Our performance tests identify workloads where well-known TMs perform differently. Finally, additional tests indicate some workloads preventing contention managers from progressing. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
transactional memory performance semantics