Runtime Validation of Transactional Memory Systems

Transactional Memory (TM) has been proposed as a promising solution to effectively harness the increasing processing power of emerging multi/many- core systems. While there has been considerable research on the design and implementation of TM systems, it remains to be shown how to address the validation challenge of such systems in face of increasing design bugs and dynamic errors. This paper proposes a runtime validation methodology for ensuring the end-to-end correctness of a TM system. We use an extended constraint graph model to capture the correctness of a transactional execution, and provide efficient hardware support to perform online checking of this constraint graph. We describe the design ideas as well as the key optimization techniques to make this approach practical. Experiments based on a state-of-the-art TM system framework show that our design effectively performs system-level runtime validation with relatively small overhead.