The Holy Grail of Transactions: Scalability & Instruction Locality

Speaker: Pinar Tozun , École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Date: Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Time: 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM Note: all times are in the Eastern Time Zone

Refreshments: 2:45 PM

Public: Yes

Location: 32-G449

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Host: Samuel Madden

Contact: Sheila M. Marian, 617-253-1996, sheila@csail.mit.edu

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Reminders to: seminars@csail.mit.edu

Reminder Subject: TALK: The Holy Grail of Transactions: Scalability & Instruction Locality

Abstract:
Traditional online transaction processing (OLTP) systems face two major challenges while trying to utilize modern hardware: (1) exploiting the abundant thread-level parallelism given by multicores and (2) taking advantage of the aggressive micro-architectural features. On the one hand, the inherent communication in traditional high performance OLTP lead to scalability bottlenecks on today's multicore and multisocket hardware. On the other hand, the large instruction footprint of the transactions cause OLTP to waste around half of its execution cycles to memory stalls.

In this talk, I first classify the most problematic critical sections of an OLTP system and show how one can eliminate them through physiological partitioning in the context of a shared-everything architecture. Then, I demonstrate that the worker threads of an OLTP system usually execute similar transactions in parallel, meaning that threads running on different cores share a non-negligible amount of instructions. By spreading the execution of a transaction over multiple cores through either programmer-transparent or transaction-aware techniques, we enable both an ample L1 instruction cache capacity, exploit the instruction commonality among transactional threads, and significantly reduce instruction misses by localizing instructions to cores as threads migrate.

Bio:
Pinar Tozun is a PhD candidate at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne working under the supervision of Prof. Anastasia Ailamaki in Data-Intensive Applications and Systems Laboratory. Her research focuses on scalability and efficiency of transaction processing systems on modern hardware. Pinar was an intern at Oracle Labs (Redwood Shores, CA) during summer 2012. Before starting her PhD, she received her BSc degree in Computer Engineering department of Koc University in 2009.

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Created by Sheila M. Marian at Wednesday, April 23, 2014 at 12:26 PM.