Designing irregular parallel algorithms with mutual exclusion and lock-free protocols

Irregular parallel algorithms pose a significant challenge for achieving high performance because of the difficulty predicting memory access patterns or execution paths. Within an irregular application, fine-grained synchronization is one technique for managing the coordination of work; but in practice the actual performance for irregular problems depends on the input, the access pattern to shared data structures, the relative speed of processors, and the hardware support of synchronization primitives. In this paper, we focus on lock-free and mutual exclusion protocols for handling fine-grained synchronization. Mutual exclusion and lock-free protocols have received a fair amount of attention in ting accesses to shared data structures from concurrent processes. Mutual exclusion offers a simple programming abstraction, while lock-free data structures provide better fault tolerance and eliminate problems associated with critical sections such as priority inversion and deadlock. These syn...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: JPDC
• Authors: Guojing Cong, David A. Bader
• Keywords: Fine-grained Synchronization, Irregular Parallel Algorithms, JPDC 2006, Mutual Exclusion