Scalable adaptive NUMA-aware lock

Abstract

Scalable locking is a key building block for scalable multi-threaded software. Its performance is especially critical in multi-socket, multi-core machines with non-uniform memory access (NUMA). Previous schemes such as local locking and remote locking only perform well under a certain level of contention, and often require non-trivial tuning for a particular configuration. Besides, for large NUMA systems, because of unmanaged lock server's nomination, current distance-first NUMA policies cannot perform satisfactorily. In this work, we propose SANL, a locking scheme that can deliver high performance under various contention levels by adaptively switching between the local and the remote lock scheme. Furthermore, we introduce a new NUMA policy for the remote lock that jointly considers node distances and server utilization when choosing lock servers. A comparison with seven representative locking schemes shows that SANL outperforms the others in most contention situations. In one group test, SANL is 3.7 times faster than RCL lock and 17 times faster than POSIX mutex.