Compiler support for concurrency synchronization

How to write a parallel program is a critical issue for Chip multi-processors (CMPs). To overcome the communication and synchronization obstacles of CMPs, transactional memory (TM) has been proposed as an alternative for controlling concurrency mechanism. Unfortunately, TM has led to seven performance pathologies: DuelingUpgrades, FutileStall, StarvingWriter, StarvingElder, SerializedCommit, RestartConvoy, and FriendlyFire. Such pathologies degrade performance during the interaction between workload and system. Although this performance issue can be solved by hardware, the software solution remains elusive. This paper proposes a priority scheduling algorithm to remedy these performance pathologies. By contrast, the proposed approach can not only solve this issue, but also achieve higher performance than hardware transactional memory (HTM) systems on some benchmarks.