Rei Odaira           

IISWC 2013 Paper

Do C and Java Programs Scale Differently on Hardware Transactional Memory?
Rei Odaira, Jose G. Castanos, and Takuya Nakaike.
In Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC), pp.34--43, 2013.

Full text [PDF]: IISWC2013_CandJavaOnHTM.pdf
Slides [PDF]: IISWC2013_CandJavaOnHTM_Slides.pdf

Abstract

People program in many different programming languages in the multi-core era, but how does each programming language affect application scalability with transactional memory? As commercial implementations of Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) enter the market, the HTM support in two major programming languages, C and Java, is of critical importance to the industry. We studied the scalability of the same transactional memory applications written in C and Java, using the STAMP benchmarks. We performed our HTM experiments on an IBM mainframe zEnterprise EC12. We found that in 4 of the 10 STAMP benchmarks Java was more scalable than C. The biggest factor in this higher scalability was the efficient thread-local memory allocator in our Java VM. In two of the STAMP benchmarks C was more scalable because in C padding can be inserted efficiently among frequently updated fields to avoid false sharing. We also found Java VM services could cause severe aborts. By fixing or avoiding these problems, we confirmed that C and Java had similar HTM scalability for the STAMP benchmarks.

Copyright

IEEE - Copyright (C) 2013 by IEEE. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.