Evaluating the Impact of Transactional Characteristics on the Performance of Transactional Memory Applications

Transactional Memory (TM) is reputed by many researchers to be a promising solution to ease parallel programming on multicore processors. This model provides the scalability of fine-grained locking while avoiding common issues of traditional mechanisms, such as deadlocks. During these almost twenty years of research, several TM systems and benchmarks have been proposed. However, TM is not yet widely adopted by the scientific community to develop parallel applications due to unanswered questions in the literature, such as "how to identify if a parallel application can exploit TM to achieve better performance?" or "what are the reasons of poor performances of some TM applications?". In this work, we contribute to answer those questions through a comparative evaluation of a set of TM applications on four different state- of-the-art TM systems. Moreover, we identify some of the most important TM characteristics that impact directly the performance of TM applications. Our results can be useful to identify opportunities for optimizations.