II-New: A Computational Infrastructure for Scalable Transactional Memory Abstractions in Managed Languages

该提案支持收购一台阿苏尔Vega 3计算设备，用于研究为高级托管语言开发开源通用事务基础设施。 此设备配备了数百个处理器内核、大量内存和带宽可用性。 这些内核采用扁平SMP配置进行计算，简化了可编程性和管理。 该设备具有许多新颖的特性，包括对并发垃圾收集的硬件支持，以及为高效事务内存（TM）支持提供关键构建块的乐观锁省略。 该项目的研究议程是探索可伸缩并行程序构造的新方法，该方法利用底层硬件原语来屏蔽或减轻迄今为止阻碍有效的可伸缩软件事务存储器系统的关键瓶颈。该项目将使用阿苏尔设备的新功能来（i）探索语言抽象，特别关注事务应用程序的可伸缩性;（ii）理解对垃圾收集和事务的原始支持如何影响使用这些抽象构建的算法和应用程序开发;（iii）检查这些机制对编译器和运行时设计的影响;和（iv）开发大量的基准和工作负载，以更好地了解TM性能特征。该项目是一个更大的NSF的一部分，资助促进TM研究的努力，这反过来又是改进通用并行计算机软件开发的关键技术。 广泛采用新的可扩展的一致性抽象，如事务内存，是主要行业参与者技术路线图中的重要组成部分，也是学术界关注的焦点。

This proposal supports the acquisition of an Azul Vega 3 compute appliancefor research on developing an open-source general-purpose transactionalinfrastructure for high-level managed languages. This appliance is equippedwith hundreds of processor cores, substantial memory, and bandwidthavailability. The cores compute in a flat SMP configuration, simplifyingprogrammability and management. The appliance has a number of novelfeatures including hardware support for concurrent garbage collection, andoptimistic lock elision that provide critical building blocks for efficienttransactional memory (TM) support. The project's research agenda is toexplore new approaches to scalable parallel program construction thatexploits underlying hardware primitives that mask or mitigate criticalbottlenecks that have thus far hampered effective scalable softwaretransactional memory systems.The project will use the novel features of the Azul appliance to (i) explorenew language abstractions with special focus on scalability of transactionalapplications; (ii) understand how primitive support for garbage collectionand transactions influence algorithm and application development built usingthese abstractions; (iii) examine the impact of these mechanisms oncompiler and runtime design; and (iv) develop a large number of benchmarksand workloads to better understand TM performance characteristics.This project is part of a larger NSF-funded effort to catalyze TM research,which in turn is a key technique to improving software development forgeneral-purpose parallel computers. Widespread adoption of new scalableconcurrency abstractions such as transactional memory is an essentialcomponent in the technology roadmap of major industry players, and the focusof much attention in academia.