Lock-Free Parallel Algorithms: An Experimental Study

Abstract. Lock-free shared data structures in the setting of distributed computing have received a fair amount of attention. Major motivations of lock-free data structures include increasing fault tolerance of a (possibly heterogeneous) system and alleviating the problems associated with critical sections such as priority inversion and deadlock. For parallel computers with tightly-coupled processors and shared memory, these issues are no longer major concerns. While many of the results are applicable especially when the model used is shared memory multiprocessors, no prior studies have considered improving the performance of a parallel implementation by way of lock-free programming. As a matter of fact, often times in practice lock-free data structures in a distributed setting do not perform as well as those that use locks. As the data structures and algorithms for parallel computing are often drastically different from those in distributed computing, it is possible that lock-free prog...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: HIPC
• Authors: Guojing Cong, David A. Bader
• Keywords: HIPC 2004, Lock-free, Lock-free Data Structures, Lock-free Programming