International audienceIn transactional memory, aborted transactions reduce performance, and waste computing resources. Ideally, concurrent execution of transactions should be optimally ordered to minimise aborts, but such an ordering is often either complex, or unfeasible, to obtain. This paper introduces a new technique called steal-on-abort, which aims to improve transaction ordering at runtime. Suppose transactions A and B conflict, and B is aborted. In general it is difficult to predict this first conflict, but once observed, it is logical not to execute the two transactions concurrently again. In steal-on-abort, the aborted transaction B is stolen by its opponent transaction A, and queued behind A to prevent concurrent execution of A and B. Without steal-on-abort, transaction B would typically have been restarted immediately, and possibly had a repeat conflict with transaction A. Steal-on-abort requires no application-specific information, modification, or offline pre-processing. In this paper, it is evaluated using a sorted linked list, red-black tree, STAMP-vacation, and Lee-TM. The evaluation reveals steal-on-abort is highly effective at eliminating repeat conflicts, which reduces the amount of computing resources wasted, and significantly improves performance

While Transactional Memory (TM) research on sharedmemory chip multiprocessors has been flourishing over the last years, limited research has been conducted in the cluster domain. In this paper, we introduce a research platform for exploiting software TM on clusters. The Distributed Software Transactional Memory (DiSTM) system has been designed for easy prototyping of TM coherence protocols and it does not rely on a software or hardware implementation of distributed shared memory. Three TM coherence protocols have been implemented and evaluated with established TM benchmarks. The decentralized Transactional Coherence and Consistency protocol has been compared against two centralized protocols that utilize leases. Results indicate that depending on network congestion and amount of contention different protocols perform better.

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