João Lourenço

Citation:

Lourenço, J. M., R. J. Dias, J. Luís, M. Rebelo, and V. Pessanha, "Understanding the Behavior of Transactional Memory Applications", Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Systems: Testing, Analysis, and Debugging (PADTAD'09), New York, NY, USA, ACM, pp. 31–39, 2009.

Abstract:

Transactional memory is a new trend in concurrency control that was boosted by the advent of multi-core processors and the near to come many-core processors. It promises the performance of finer grain with the simplicity of coarse grain threading. However, there is a clear absence of software development tools oriented to the transactional memory programming model, which is confirmed by the very small number of related scientific works published until now. This paper describes ongoing work. We propose a very low overhead monitoring framework, developed specifically for monitoring TM computations, that collects the transactional events into a single log file, sorted in a global order. This framework is then used by a visualization tool to display different types of charts from two categories: statistical charts and thread-time space diagrams. These last diagrams are interactive, allowing to identify conflicting transactions. We use the visualization tool to analyse the behavior of two different, but similar, testing applications, illustrating how it can be used to better understand the behavior of these transactional memory applications.

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