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Highly-Efficient Wait-Free Synchronization

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Abstract

We study a simple technique, originally presented by Herlihy (ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 15(5):745–770, 1993), for executing concurrently, in a wait-free manner, blocks of code that have been programmed for sequential execution and require significant synchronization in order to be performed in parallel. We first present an implementation of this technique, called Sim, which employs a collect object. We describe a simple implementation of a collect object from a single shared object that supports atomic Add (or XOR) in addition to read; this implementation has step complexity O(1). By plugging in to Sim this implementation, Sim exhibits constant step complexity as well. This allows us to derive lower bounds on the step complexity of implementations of several shared objects, like Add, XOR, collect, and snapshot objects, from LL/SC objects.

We then present a practical version of Sim, called PSim, which is implemented in a real shared-memory machine. From a theoretical perspective, PSim has worse step complexity than Sim, its theoretical analog; in practice though, we experimentally show that PSim is highly-efficient: it outperforms several state-of-the-art lock-based and lock-free synchronization techniques, and this given that it is wait-free, i.e. that it satisfies a stronger progress condition than all the algorithms that it outperforms. We have used PSim to get highly-efficient wait-free implementations of stacks and queues.

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Notes

  1. We sometimes abuse notation and use op to denote an operation or an instance of it, depending on the context.

  2. For simplicity we sometimes say that a request req by a thread p i executes Attempt (or any other line of the pseudocode) meaning that the instance of SimApplyOp that is called by p i for req executes Attempt (or any code line in reference). Moreover, when we refer to the execution interval of some request req, we mean the execution interval of the instance of SimApplyOp that is invoked with parameter req.

  3. For clarity of the proof, we consider each \(\mathit{req}_{j}^{i}\) as distinct.

  4. For simplicity, we assume that d is a divisor of b, so that the d bits allocated to each thread are not split across two Add objects.

  5. We remark that in the real code we use a pool of nC+1 structures, where C>1 is a small constant, for performance reasons. However, using a pool of just 2n+1 structures is enough to prove correctness. For code simplicity, Algorithm 2 uses 2n+2 such structures.

  6. In the real code, Pool is implemented as a one-dimensional array, and S is an index indicating one of its elements.

  7. This problem occurs when a thread p reads some value A from a shared variable and then some other thread p′ modifies the variable to the value B and back to A; when p begins execution again, it sees that the value of the variable has not changed and continues executing normally which might be incorrect.

  8. We experimentally saw that MCS spin locks [27] have similar performance to CLH spin locks, so we present our results only for CLH locks.

  9. The number of combining rounds determines how many times the combiner (in flat-combining) traverses the request list before it gives up serving other requests.

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Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this paper, entitled “A highly-efficient wait-free universal construction”, appears in the Proceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA ’11), pp. 325–334, San Jose, California, USA, June 2011.

We would like to thank Dimitris Nikolopoulos, Angelos Bilas, and Manolis Katevenis for several useful discussions. We especially thank Dimitris Nikolopoulos for arranging the provision of access to some of the multi-core machines of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech (VT) where we ran our experiments. Many thanks to Nir Shavit and Danny Hendler for providing the code of flat-combining. We would like to especially thank Nir Shavit for several fruitful discussions and for his valuable feedback on the paper. Thanks also to Faith Ellen for several useful comments on a preliminary version of this paper [13]. Moreover, we thank Victor Luchangco for his valuable feedback on the results and the presentation of the paper. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback.

Nikolaos Kallimanis is supported by a PhD scholarship from Empirikion Foundation, Athens, Greece. The work of Panagiota Fatourou is supported by the European Commission under 7th Framework Program through the TransForm (FP7-MCITN-238639) and CumuloNimbo (FP7-STREP-257993) projects, and by the GSRT-ESPA project GreenVM (Excellence-1643).

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Crete & FORTH ICS, Heraklion, Greece

    Panagiota Fatourou

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece

    Nikolaos D. Kallimanis

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  1. Panagiota Fatourou
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Correspondence to Nikolaos D. Kallimanis.

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Fatourou, P., Kallimanis, N.D. Highly-Efficient Wait-Free Synchronization. Theory Comput Syst 55, 475–520 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-013-9491-y

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