Performance evaluation of Intel® Transactional Synchronization Extensions for high-performance computing

Abstract

Intel has recently introduced Intel® Transactional Synchro-nization Extensions (Intel® TSX) in the Intel 4th Gen-eration Core™ Processors. With Intel TSX, a processor can dynamically determine whether threads need to serial-ize through lock-protected critical sections. In this paper, we evaluate the first hardware implementation of Intel TSX using a set of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, and demonstrate that applying Intel TSX to these workloads can provide significant performance improvements. On a set of real-world HPC workloads, applying Intel TSX provides an average speedup of 1.41x. When applied to a parallel user-level TCP/IP stack, Intel TSX provides 1.31x average bandwidth improvement on network intensive applications. We also demonstrate the ease with which we were able to apply Intel TSX to the various workloads. Copyright 2013 ACM.