Abstract
This paper addresses the problem of universal synchronization primitives that can support scalable thread synchronization for large-scale manycore architectures. The universal synchronization primitives that have been deployed widely in conventional architectures, are the compare-and-swap (CAS) and load-linked/store-conditional (LL/SC) primitives. However, such synchronization primitives are expected to reach their scalability limits in the evolution to manycore architectures with thousands of cores.
We introduce a non-blocking full/empty bit primitive, or NB-FEB for short, as a promising synchronization primitive for parallel programming on manycore architectures. We show that the NB-FEB primitive is universal, scalable, feasible and easy to use. NB-FEB, together with registers, can solve the consensus problem for an arbitrary number of processes (universality). NB-FEB is combinable, namely its memory requests to the same memory location can be combined into only one memory request, which consequently makes NB-FEB scalable (scalability). Since NB-FEB is a variant of the original full/empty bit that always returns a value instead of waiting for a conditional flag, it is as feasible as the original full/empty bit, which has been implemented in many computer systems (feasibility). We construct, on top of NB-FEB, a non-blocking software transactional memory system called NBFEB-STM, which can be used as an abstraction to handle concurrent threads easily. NBFEB-STM is space efficient: the space complexity of each object updated by N concurrent threads/transactions is \({\it \Theta}(N)\), which is optimal.
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Ha, P.H., Tsigas, P., Anshus, O.J. (2009). NB-FEB: A Universal Scalable Easy-to-Use Synchronization Primitive for Manycore Architectures. In: Abdelzaher, T., Raynal, M., Santoro, N. (eds) Principles of Distributed Systems. OPODIS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5923. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10877-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10877-8_16
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