Insertion Tree Phasers: Efficient and Scalable Barrier Synchronization for Fine-Grained Parallelism

This paper presents an algorithm and a data structure for scalable dynamic synchronization in fine-grained parallelism. The algorithm supports the full generality of phasers with dynamic, two-phase, and point-to-point synchronization. It retains the scalability of classical tree barriers, but provides unbounded dynamicity by employing a tailor-made insertion tree data structure. It is the first completely documented implementation strategy for a scalable phaser synchronization construct. Our evaluation shows that it can be used as a drop-in replacement for classic barriers without harming performance, despite its additional complexity and potential for performance optimizations. Furthermore, our approach overcomes performance and scalability limitations which have been present in other phaser proposals. Keywords-Fine-grained parallelism; barriers; phasers; synchronization; many-core; data structures; trees; algorithms

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: HPCC
• Authors: Stefan Marr, Stijn Verhaegen, Bruno De Fraine, Theo D'Hondt, Wolfgang De Meuter
• Keywords: Data Structures, Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCC 2010, Scalable Dynamic Synchronization, Scalable Phaser Synchronization