Previous work has shown how to insert fences that enforce sequential consistency. However, for many concurrent algorithms, sequential consistency is unnecessarily strong and can lead to high execution overhead. The reason is that, often, correctness relies on the execution order of a few specific pairs of instructions. Algorithm designers can declare those execution orders and thereby enable memory-model-independent reasoning about correctness and also ease implementation of algorithms on multiple platforms. The literature has examples of such reasoning, while tool support for enforcing the orders has been lacking until now. In this paper we present a declarative approach to specify and enforce execution orders. Our fence insertion algorithm first identifies the execution orders that a given memory model enforces automatically, and then inserts fences that enforce the rest. Our benchmarks include three off-the-shelf transactional memory algorithms written in C/C++ for which we specify suitable execution orders. For those benchmarks, our experiments with the x86 and ARMv7 memory models show that our tool inserts fences that are competitive with those inserted by the original authors. Our tool is the first to insert fences into transactional memory algorithms and it solves the long-standing problem of how to easily port such algorithms to a novel memory model.
Thu 29 OctDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
10:30 - 12:00 | |||
10:30 22mTalk | Declarative Fence Insertion OOPSLA John Bender University of California at Los Angeles, USA, Mohsen Lesani MIT, Jens Palsberg University of California at Los Angeles, USA Link to publication | ||
10:52 22mTalk | Finding Deep Compiler Bugs via Guided Stochastic Program Mutation OOPSLA Vu Le University of California at Davis, USA, Chengnian Sun University of California at Davis, USA, Zhendong Su University of California at Davis, USA DOI | ||
11:15 22mTalk | Vectorization of Apply to Reduce Interpretation Overhead of R OOPSLA Haichuan Wang University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, David Padua University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Peng Wu Huawei America Lab DOI | ||
11:37 22mTalk | Synthesizing Java Expressions from Free-Form Queries OOPSLA Link to publication |