A fast, scalable mutual exclusion algorithm

Abstract

This paper is concerned with synchornization under read/write atomicity in shared memory multi-processors. We present a new algorithm forN-process mutual exclusion that requires only read and write operations and that hasO(logN) time complexity, where “time” is measured by counting remote memory references. The time complexity of this algorithm is better than that of all prior solutions to the mutual exclusion problem that are based upon atomic read and write instructions; in fact, the time complexity of most prior solutions is unbounded. Performance studies are presented that show that our mutual exclusion algorithm exhibits scalable performance under heavy contention. In fact, its performance rivals that of the fastest queue-based spin locks based on strong primitives such as compare-and-swap and fetch-and-add. We also present a modified version of our algorithm that generates onlyO(1) memory references in the absence of contention.