Read/write fence-free work-stealing with multiplicity

Abstract

It has been shown that any nonblocking algorithm for work-stealing in the standard asynchronous shared memory model of computation must use expensive Read-After-Write synchronization patterns or atomic Read-Modify-Write instructions. Algorithms for relaxations of work-stealing have been proposed, which only partially avoid this impossibility result. In restricted models of computation, work-stealing algorithms have been designed that avoid Read-After-Write patterns and atomic Read-Modify-Write instructions.This paper considers work-stealing with multiplicity, a relaxation in which every task is taken by at least one process, and any process can take any task at most once. We study two variants of the relaxation, for each variant designing a Read/Write wait-free algorithm in the standard asynchronous shared memory model. The two algorithms are devoid of Read-After-Write synchronization patterns in all their operations, and additionally, the algorithm for the second variant has constant step complexity and is fence-free. Namely, no specific ordering among the algorithm's instructions is required beyond what is implied by data dependence. To our knowledge, these are the first algorithms for relaxations of work-stealing possessing all these properties. The algorithms are also solutions to relaxed versions of single-enqueuer multi-dequeuer queues. The theoretical results are complemented with an experimental evaluation showing that the benefits of relaxed work-stealing vary depending on the application, concretely on the complexity of the work associated with each task.