A case for including transactions in OpenMP

Transactional Memory (TM) has received significant attention recently as a mechanism to reduce the complexity of shared memory programming. We explore the potential of TM to improve OpenMP applications. We combine a software TM (STM) system to support transactions with an OpenMP implementation to start thread teams and provide task and loop-level parallelization. We apply this system to two application scenarios that reflect realistic TM use cases. Our results with this system demonstrate that even with the relatively high overheads of STM, transactions can outperform OpenMP critical sections by 10%. Overall, our study demonstrates that extending OpenMP to include transactions would ease programming effort while allowing improved performance.