Performance Comparison of Various STM Concurrency Control Protocols Using Synchrobench

TL;DR

This paper compares the performance of various Software Transactional Memory (STM) concurrency control protocols, specifically BTO, SGT, and MVTO, using Synchrobench to evaluate their efficiency in multi-threaded environments.

Contribution

It implements and evaluates three STM protocols within a unified library, providing a comprehensive performance comparison against existing linked-list modules.

Findings

BTO and MVTO outperform other protocols in CPU time for high thread counts.

BTO and MVTO have similar performance levels.

Both outperform SGT by 9% to 36%.

Abstract

Writing concurrent programs for shared memory multiprocessor systems is a nightmare. This hinders users to exploit the full potential of multiprocessors. STM (Software Transactional Memory) is a promising concurrent programming paradigm which addresses woes of programming for multiprocessor systems. In this paper, we implement BTO (Basic Timestamp Ordering), SGT (Serialization Graph Testing) and MVTO(Multi-Version Time-Stamp Ordering) concurrency control protocols and build an STM(Software Transactional Memory) library to evaluate the performance of these protocols. The deferred write approach is followed to implement the STM. A SET data structure is implemented using the transactions of our STM library. And this transactional SET is used as a test application to evaluate the STM. The performance of the protocols is rigorously compared against the linked-list module of the Synchrobench benchmark. Linked list module implements SET data structure using lazy-list, lock-free list, lock-coupling list and ESTM (Elastic Software Transactional Memory). Our analysis shows that for a number of threads greater than 60 and update rate 70%, BTO takes (17% to 29%) and (6% to 24%) less CPU time per thread when compared against lazy-list and lock-coupling list respectively. MVTO takes (13% to 24%) and (3% to 24%) less CPU time per thread when compared against lazy-list and lock-coupling list respectively. BTO and MVTO have similar per thread CPU time. BTO and MVTO outperform SGT by 9% to 36%.