Scalable reader-writer locks

We present three new reader-writer lock algorithms that scale under high read-only contention. Many previous reader-writer locks suffer significant degradation when many readers attempt to acquire the lock concurrently, even though they are all allowed to hold the lock at the same time. In contrast, our locks scale almost perfectly when there is only read contention on a 4-chip system with a total of 256 hardware threads. Two of the algorithms extend the MCS queue mutex to provide reader-writer synchronization with low overhead, and can be used when busy-waiting synchronization is appropriate. The third algorithm is an improvement on a production-quality reader-writer lock used in the SolarisTM kernel, which provides robust priority and flexible fairness guarantees. A key tool we developed to implement our reader-writer locks is the closable scalable nonzero indicator (C-SNZI), a variation on the SNZI object. C-SNZI objects allow us to significantly reduce the contention among reads w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SPAA
• Authors: Yossi Lev, Victor Luchangco, Marek Olszewski
• Keywords: Lock Algorithms, Parallel Computing, Production-quality Reader-writer Lock, Reader-writer Lock Algorithms, SPAA 2009