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A Portable Lock-Free Bounded Queue

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Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10048))

Abstract

Attaining efficient and portable lock-free containers is challenging as almost any CPU family implements slightly different memory models and atomic read-modify-write operations. C++11 offers a memory model and operation abstractions that enable portable implementations of non-blocking algorithms. In this paper, we present a first scalable and portable lock-free bounded queue supporting multiple readers and multiple writers. Our design uses unique empty values to decouple writing an element from incrementing the tail during enqueue. Dequeue employs a helping scheme that delays helping in the regular case, thereby reducing contention on shared memory. We evaluate our implementation on architectures featuring weak and strong memory consistency models. Our comparison with known blocking and lock-free designs shows that the presented implementation scales well on architectures that implement a weak memory consistency model.

P. Pirkelbauer—This work was partially funded by a Google Research Award, and by NSF grants CNS-0821497 and CNS-1229282. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions for improvements.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, 35294, USA

    Peter Pirkelbauer & Reed Milewicz

  2. Motorola Solutions, Birmingham, AL, 35243, USA

    Juan Felipe Gonzalez

Authors
  1. Peter Pirkelbauer
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  2. Reed Milewicz
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  3. Juan Felipe Gonzalez
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Pirkelbauer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University Carlos III of Madrid, Leganes, Spain

    Jesus Carretero

  2. Carlos III University of Madrid, Leganes, Madrid, Spain

    Javier Garcia-Blas

  3. The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

    Ryan K.L. Ko

  4. IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Rüschlikon, Switzerland

    Peter Mueller

  5. Hiroshima University, Higashi-Hiroshima, Japan

    Koji Nakano

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Pirkelbauer, P., Milewicz, R., Gonzalez, J.F. (2016). A Portable Lock-Free Bounded Queue. In: Carretero, J., Garcia-Blas, J., Ko, R., Mueller, P., Nakano, K. (eds) Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing. ICA3PP 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10048. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49583-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49583-5_4

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-49582-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-49583-5

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