Software Transactional Memory for GPU Architectures

Abstract

Modern GPUs have shown promising results in accelerating computation intensive and numerical workloads with limited dynamic data sharing. However, many real-world applications manifest ample amount of data sharing among concurrently executing threads. Often data sharing requires mutual exclusion mechanism to ensure data integrity in multithreaded environment. Although modern GPUs provide atomic primitives that can be leveraged to construct fine-grained locks, lock-based synchronization requires significant programming efforts to achieve functional correctness. The massive multithreading and SIMT execution paradigm of GPUs further extend the challenges of GPU locks.