Skip to main content

Analyzing the Performance of Lock-Free Data Structures: A Conflict-Based Model

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Distributed Computing (DISC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 9363))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

This paper considers the modeling and the analysis of the performance of lock-free concurrent data structures that can be represented as linear combinations of fixed size retry loops.

Our main contribution is a new way of modeling and analyzing a general class of lock-free algorithms, achieving predictions of throughput that are close to what we observe in practice. We emphasize two kinds of conflicts that shape the performance: (i) hardware conflicts, due to concurrent calls to atomic primitives; (ii) logical conflicts, caused by concurrent operations on the shared data structure.

We propose also a common framework that enables a fair comparison between lock-free implementations by covering the whole contention domain, and comes with a method for calculating a good back-off strategy.

Our experimental results, based on a set of widely used concurrent data structures and on abstract lock-free designs, show that our analysis follows closely the actual code behavior.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Alemany, J., Felten, E.W.: Performance issues in non-blocking synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors. In: Hutchinson, N.C. (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PoDC), pp. 125–134. ACM (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Alistarh, D., Censor-Hillel, K., Shavit, N.: Are lock-free concurrent algorithms practically wait-free? In: Shmoys, D.B. (ed.) Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), pp. 714–723. ACM, June 2014

    Google Scholar 

  3. Anderson, J.H., Ramamurthy, S., Jeffay, K.: Real-time computing with lock-free shared objects. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems (TOCS) 15(2), 134–165 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Atalar, A., Renaud-Goud, P.: Numerical simulation code. http://graal.ens-lyon.fr/ prenaud/disc15/

  5. Atalar, A., Renaud-Goud, P., Tsigas, P.: Analyzing the performance of lock-free data structures: A conflict-based model. Tech. Rep. 2014:15, Chalmers University of Technology, January 2015. http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.03566

  6. David, T., Guerraoui, R., Trigonakis, V.: Everything you always wanted to know about synchronization but were afraid to ask. In: Kaminsky, M., Dahlin, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP), pp. 33–48. ACM, November 2013

    Google Scholar 

  7. Dice, D., Lev, Y., Moir, M.: Scalable statistics counters. In: Blelloch, G.E., Vöcking, B. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), pp. 43–52. ACM, July 2013

    Google Scholar 

  8. Dragicevic, K., Bauer, D.: A survey of concurrent priority queue algorithms. In: Proceedings of the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), pp. 1–6, April 2008

    Google Scholar 

  9. Goodman, J.R., Hum, H.H.J.: Mesif: A two-hop cache coherency protocol for point-to-point interconnects. Tech. rep., University of Auckland, November 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2292/11594

  10. Hendler, D., Shavit, N., Yerushalmi, L.: A scalable lock-free stack algorithm. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC) 70(1), 1–12 (2010)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Intel: Lock scaling analysis on Intel\(^{\textregistered }\) Xeon\(^{\textregistered }\) processors. Tech. Rep. 328878–001, Intel, April 2013

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kogan, A., Herlihy, M.: The future(s) of shared data structures. In: Halldórsson, M.M., Dolev, S. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PoDC), pp. 30–39. ACM, July 2014

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lindén, J., Jonsson, B.: A skiplist-based concurrent priority queue with minimal memory contention. In: Baldoni, R., Nisse, N., van Steen, M. (eds.) OPODIS 2013. LNCS, vol. 8304, pp. 206–220. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Michael, M.M., Scott, M.L.: Simple, fast, and practical non-blocking and blocking concurrent queue algorithms. In: Burns, J.E., Moses, Y. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PoDC), pp. 267–275. ACM, May 1996

    Google Scholar 

  15. Shavit, N., Lotan, I.: Skiplist-based concurrent priority queues. In: Proceedings of the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), pp. 263–268, May 2000

    Google Scholar 

  16. Treiber, R.K.: Systems programming: Coping with parallelism. Thomas J. Watson Research Center, International Business Machines Incorporated (1986)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Valois, J.D.: Implementing lock-free queues. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), pp. 64–69, December 1994

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aras Atalar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Atalar, A., Renaud-Goud, P., Tsigas, P. (2015). Analyzing the Performance of Lock-Free Data Structures: A Conflict-Based Model. In: Moses, Y. (eds) Distributed Computing. DISC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9363. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48653-5_23

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48653-5_23

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-48652-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-48653-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics