Tiefei Zhang

SPMTM: A Novel ScratchPad Memory Based Hybrid Nested Transactional Memory Framework

Chip multiprocessor (CMP) has been the mainstream of processor design with the progress in semiconductor technology. It provides higher concurrency for the threads compared with the traditional single-core processor. Lock-based synchronization of multi-threads has been proved as an inefficient approach with high overhead. The previous works show that TM is an efficient solution to solve the synchronization of multi-threads. This paper presents SPMTM, a novel on-chip memory based nested TM framework. The on-chip memory used in this framework is not cache but scratchpad memory (SPM), which is software-controlled SRAM on chip. TM information will be stored in SPM to enhance the access speed and reduce the power consumption in SPMTM. Experimental results show that SPMTM can obtain average 16.3% performance improvement of the benchmarks compared with lock-based synchronization and with the increase in the number of processor core, the performance improvement is more significant.