Performance evaluation of Intel® transactional synchronization extensions for high-performance computing

ABSTRACT

Intel has recently introduced Intel^® Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel^® TSX) in the Intel 4th Generation Core™ Processors. With Intel TSX, a processor can dynamically determine whether threads need to serialize through lock-protected critical sections. In this paper, we evaluate the first hardware implementation of Intel TSX using a set of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, and demonstrate that applying Intel TSX to these workloads can provide significant performance improvements. On a set of real-world HPC workloads, applying Intel TSX provides an average speedup of 1.41x. When applied to a parallel user-level TCP/IP stack, Intel TSX provides 1.31x average bandwidth improvement on network intensive applications. We also demonstrate the ease with which we were able to apply Intel TSX to the various workloads.

References

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Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Architectures

    • Parallel architectures

• Computing methodologies

  • Concurrent computing methodologies

    • Concurrent programming languages

• Hardware

  • Hardware validation

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • General programming languages

      • Language types

        • Concurrent programming languages