Access To Critical Section Research Articles

Evaluating and optimizing stabilizing dining philosophers

We study theoretical and practical aspects of five of the most well-known self-stabilizing dining philosophers algorithms. We theoretically prove that three of them are incorrect. For practical evaluation, we simulate these five algorithms as well as two classic non-self-stabilizing algorithms and evaluate their fault-tolerance, latency and throughput of critical section access. We present a new combined algorithm that achieves the best throughput of the two remaining correct self-stabilizing algorithms by determining the system load and switching between these basic algorithms. We prove the combined algorithm correct, simulate it and study its performance characteristics.

Opportunistic competition overhead reduction for expediting critical section in NoC based CMPs

With the degree of parallelism increasing, performance of multi-threaded shared variable applications is not only limited by serialized critical section execution, but also by the serialized competition overhead for threads to get access to critical section. As the number of concurrent threads grows, such competition overhead may exceed the time spent in critical section itself, and become the dominating factor limiting the performance of parallel applications. In modern operating systems, queue spinlock, which comprises a low-overhead spinning phase and a high-overhead sleeping phase, is often used to lock critical sections. In the paper, we show that this advanced locking solution may create very high competition overhead for multithreaded applications executing in NoC-based CMPs. Then we propose a software-hardware cooperative mechanism that can opportunistically maximize the chance that a thread wins the critical section access in the low-overhead spinning phase, thereby reducing the competition overhead. At the OS primitives level, we monitor the remaining times of retry (RTR) in a thread's spinning phase, which reflects in how long the thread must enter into the high-overhead sleep mode. At the hardware level, we integrate the RTR information into the packets of locking requests, and let the NoC prioritize locking request packets according to the RTR information. The principle is that the smaller RTR a locking request packet carries, the higher priority it gets and thus quicker delivery. We evaluate our opportunistic competition overhead reduction technique with cycle-accurate full-system simulations in GEM5 using PARSEC (11 programs) and SPEC OMP2012 (14 programs) benchmarks. Compared to the original queue spinlock implementation, experimental results show that our method can effectively increase the opportunity of threads entering the critical section in low-overhead spinning phase, reducing the competition overhead averagely by 39.9% (maximally by 61.8%) and accelerating the execution of the Region-of-Interest averagely by 14.4% (maximally by 24.5%) across all 25 benchmark programs.

A time complexity lower bound for adaptive mutual exclusion

We consider the time complexity of adaptive mutual exclusion algorithms, where “time” is measured by counting the number of remote memory references required per critical-section access. For systems that support (only) read, write, and comparison primitives (such as compare-and-swap), we establish a lower bound that precludes a deterministic algorithm with o(k) time complexity, where k is point contention. In particular, it is impossible to construct a deterministic O(log k) algorithm based on such primitives.

A distributed mutual exclusion algorithm over multi-routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

In this paper, we propose a new architecture to solve the problem of mutual exclusion in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). The architecture is composed of two layers: (i) a middleware layer that contains a token-based distributed mutual exclusion algorithm (DMEA) and (ii) a network layer that includes two routing forwarding strategies: one to route request messages and the other to route the token message. We also propose a request ordering policy that ensures the usual mutual exclusion properties and reduces the number of hops traversed per critical section (CS) access. The paper also addresses the problem of network partitioning and unreachable nodes. The proposed mutual exclusion algorithm is further enhanced to provide fault tolerance by preventing the loss of the token and generating a new token if the token loss event occurs. The performance complexity as well as the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm experiences low number of hops per CS access.

A fair distributed mutual exclusion algorithm

This paper presents a fair decentralized mutual exclusion algorithm for distributed systems in which processes communicate by asynchronous message passing. The algorithm requires between N-1 and 2(N-1) messages per critical section access, where N is the number of processes in the system. The exact message complexity can be expressed as a deterministic function of concurrency in the computation. The algorithm does not introduce any other overheads over Lamport's and Ricart-Agrawala's algorithms, which require 3(N-1) and 2(N-1) messages, respectively, per critical section access and are the only other decentralized algorithms that allow mutual exclusion access in the order of the timestamps of requests.

A Distributed Critical Section Protocol for General Topology

We present a new critical section protocol designed for distributed systems with general topologies, where the physical layer is implemented as point-to-point physical links in contrast to shared access physical media. The protocol operates correctly for any topology; however, its time performance is topology dependent. The distributed system can be modeled by a graph G(V, E), where V denotes the set of processors and E is the set of bidirectional communication links. We use n to denote |V|; D(G) is the diameter of G, T(G) is the spanning tree of G, and D(T) is the diameter of T(G). An important measure of the performance of the protocol is the amount of traffic caused by its operation. Let message-hop be the amount of traffic generated by a single message between two adjacent nodes. The proposed protocol generates network traffic of only 3*(n − 1) ∈ Θ(n) [message-hops] per critical section access for any topology which is less than other existing fully distributed protocols. A lower bound on traffic for a single critical section access for a fully distributed protocol is shown to be 2*(n − 1) [message-hops]. Some previously published algorithms generate Θ(n2) [message-hops] of network traffic for some topologies. Another important measure of the performance of the protocol is the cs-access time. It is the time required to access the critical section in the absence of other requests; and it depends on the topology. The high cs-access time performance is achieved by taking a novel approach of distributing the communication and parts of computation functions of the protocol and exploiting the physical topology. For a constant size message, the time to traverse an edge, including the message communication software processing in the source and destination nodes, is called message-hop-time and it is denoted by th. For a general graph G (with spanning tree T) the new protocol has the cs-access time performance Θ(max(D(T), max(deg (vi)))) [th], where deg(vi) is computed in T. For the graphs where G has D(G) ∈ Θ(log2n) and max(deg(vi)) in G is O(log2n), the cs-access time performance is Θ(log2n) [th]. For the class of graphs where G has D(G) ∈ Θ(n), the cs-access time performance is Θ(n) [th]. For the Star graphs the cs-access time performance is Θ(n) [th]. The worst case time performance occurs for linear and Star graphs. The proposed protocol has a better network traffic performance and (depending on the topology) a better or equal cs-access time performance than previously published fully distributed protocols. The protocol keeps the clock bounded in well-designed systems using a distributed predictive "clock squashing" mechanism.