Dealing with Reduction Operations Using Transactional Memory

• Miguel A. Gonzalez-Mesa University of Malaga
• Ricardo Quislant University of Malaga
• Eladio Gutierrez University of Malaga
• Oscar Plata University of Malaga

Abstract

Reductions are common operations in many real-world applications that may be responsible for a significant part of the computing time. Modern compilers implement parallel reductions by combining privatization, atomic operations and/or locks. In this paper we analyze how to address reductions in the transactional memory (TM) model, which is flourishing together with the modern shared-memory multicore-based parallel architectures. With this purpose, this paper studies which support needs to be added to a TM system to deal with reductions as a special case of conflicting memory accesses.

Keywords: Arrays, Privatization, Synchronization, Multicore processing, Program processors, Hardware, Transactional memory, reduction operations, partial reductions, selective privatization