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Software Engineering with Transactional Memory Versus Locks in Practice

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Abstract

Transactional Memory (TM) promises to simplify parallel programming by replacing locks with atomic transactions. Despite much recent progress in TM research, there is very little experience using TM to develop realistic parallel programs from scratch. In this article, we present the results of a detailed case study comparing teams of programmers developing a parallel program from scratch using transactional memory and locks. We analyze and quantify in a realistic environment the development time, programming progress, code metrics, programming patterns, and ease of code understanding for six teams who each wrote a parallel desktop search engine over a fifteen week period. Three randomly chosen teams used Intel’s Software Transactional Memory compiler and Pthreads, while the other teams used just Pthreads. Our analysis is exploratory: Given the same requirements, how far did each team get? The TM teams were among the first to have a prototype parallel search engine. Compared to the locks teams, the TM teams spent less than half the time debugging segmentation faults, but had more problems tuning performance and implementing queries. Code inspections with industry experts revealed that TM code was easier to understand than locks code, because the locks teams used many locks (up to thousands) to improve performance. Learning from each team’s individual success and failure story, this article provides valuable lessons for improving TM.

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Notes

  1. This study has been conducted while the first author was at KIT in Germany.

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Acknowledgements

We thank KIT and the Excellence Initiative for supporting the first author during this study. We also thank Frank Otto for helping with lab organization, and Matthias Dempe and Nikolay Petkov for assisting with performance measurements. For code inspections, we appreciate the feedback of the Intel STM team, Ravi Narayanaswamy, Yang Ni, Tatiana Shpeisman, Xinmin Tian, and Adam Welc. Further feedback was provided by Chris Vick at Sun Labs.

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Author notes

  1. Victor Pankratius

    Present address: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programming Systems Lab, Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA

    Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai

Authors
  1. Victor Pankratius
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  2. Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Victor Pankratius.

Appendix

Appendix

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Effort categories logged by each team

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Effort category 1: Time spent on reading

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Effort category 2: Time spent on search for libraries

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Effort category 3: Time spent on conceptual development and design

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Effort category 4: Time spent on implementation

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Effort category 5: Time spent on experimentation

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Effort category 6: Time spent on testing

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Fig. 13
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Effort category 7: Time spent on debugging

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Pankratius, V., Adl-Tabatabai, AR. Software Engineering with Transactional Memory Versus Locks in Practice. Theory Comput Syst 55, 555–590 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-013-9452-5

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