Lightweight software transactions for games

Abstract

To realize the performance potential of multiple cores, soft-ware developers must architect their programs for concur-rency. Unfortunately, for many applications, threads and locks are difficult to use efficiently and correctly. Thus, re-searchers have proposed transactional memory as a simpler alternative. To investigate if and how software transactional mem-ory (STM) can help a programmer to parallelize applica-tions, we perform a case study on a game application called SpaceWars3D. After experiencing suboptimal performance, we depart from classic STM designs and propose a program-ming model that uses long-running, abort-free transactions that rely on user specifications to avoid or resolve conflicts. With this model we achieve the combined goal of competi-tive performance and improved programmability. 1.