Lock-free Research Articles

Transactional memory as an approach to building a lock-free data structure

The development of a lock-free data structure is a vital problem. Existing approaches are ineffective and susceptible to different problems, the main one is the ABA problem. In 2013 Intel embedded hardware support of transactional memory in their processors. The lock-free implementation of Treap is described in this study. Authors compared the results of the experiment carried out on lock-based and TSX-based Treap. Analysis of this comparison reveals the feasibility of this approach for building a lock-free data structure.

The topology of look-compute-move robot wait-free algorithms with hard termination

Look-Compute-Move models for a set of autonomous robots have been thoroughly studied for over two decades. We consider the standard Asynchronous Luminous Robots (ALR) model, where robots are located in a graph G. Each robot, repeatedly Looks at its surroundings and obtains a snapshot containing the vertices of G, where all robots are located; based on this snapshot, each robot Computes a vertex (adjacent to its current position), and then Moves to it. Robots have visible lights, allowing them to communicate more information than only its actual position, and they move asynchronously, meaning that each one runs at its own arbitrary speed. We are also interested in a case which has been barely explored: the robots need not all be present initially, they might appear asynchronously. We call this the Extended Asynchronous Appearing Luminous Robots (EALR) model. A central problem in the mobile robots area is bringing the robots to the same vertex. We study several versions of this problem, where the robots move towards the same (or close to each other) vertices. And we concentrate on the requirement that each robot executes a finite number of Look-Compute-Move cycles, independently of the interleaving of other robot’s cycles, and then stops. Our main result is direct connections between the (ALR and) EALR model and the asynchronous wait-free multiprocess read/write shared memory (WFSM) model. General robot tasks in a graph are also provided, which include several version of gathering. Finally, using the connection between the EALR model and the WFSM model, a combinatorial topology characterization for the solvable robot tasks is presented.

Every data structure deserves lock-free memory reclamation

Memory-management support for lock-free data structures is well known to be a tough problem. Recent work has successfully reduced the overhead of such schemes. However, applying memory-management support to a data structure remains complex and, in many cases, requires redesigning the data structure. In this paper, we present the first lock-free memory-management scheme that is applicable to general (arbitrary) lock-free data structures and that can be applied automatically via a compiler plug-in. In addition to the simplicity of incorporating to data structures, this scheme provides low overhead and does not rely on the lock freedom of any OS services.

Gathering of mobile robots with weak multiplicity detection in presence of crash-faults

We study the Gathering problem for mobile robots in presence of faults. In classical gathering, robots gather at a point not known a priori in finite time. In this paper, we focus on gathering of all non-faulty robots at a single point in the presence of faulty robots. We propose a wait-free algorithm (i.e., no robot waits for other robot and the algorithm instructs each robot to move in every step, unless it is already at the gathering location), that gathers all non-faulty robots in the semi-synchronous model without any agreement in the coordinate system and with weak multiplicity detection (i.e., a robot can only detect that either there is one or more robots at a location) in the presence of at most n−1 faulty robots for n⩾3. We show that the required capability for gathering robots is minimal in the above model since relaxing it further makes gathering impossible to solve.Also, we introduce a scheduling model as the asynchronous model with instantaneous computation (ASYNCIC), which lies in between the asynchronous and the semi-synchronous model. Then we propose another algorithm in the ASYNCIC model for gathering all non-faulty robots with weak multiplicity detection and without any agreement on the coordinate system in the presence of at most ⌊n∕2⌋−2 faulty robots for n⩾7.

Scheduling Weakly Consistent C Concurrency for Reconfigurable Hardware

Lock-free algorithms, in which threads synchronise not via coarse-grained mutual exclusion but via fine-grained atomic operations (`atomics'), have been shown empirically to be the fastest class of multi-threaded algorithms in the realm of conventional processors. This article explores how these algorithms can be compiled from C to reconfigurable hardware via high-level synthesis(HLS). We focus on the scheduling problem, in which software instructions are assigned to hardware clock cycles. We first show that typical HLS scheduling constraints are insufficient to implement atomics, because they permit some instruction reorderings that, though sound in a single-threaded context, demonstrably cause erroneous results when synthesising multi-threaded programs. We then show that correct behaviour can be restored by imposing additional intra-thread constraints among the memory operations. In addition, we show that we can support the pipelining of loops containing atomics by injecting further inter-iteration constraints. We implement our approach on two constraint-based scheduling HLS tools: LegUp 4.0 and LegUp 5.1. We extend both tools to support two memory models that are capable of synthesising atomics correctly. The first memory model only supports sequentially consistent (SC) atomics and the second supports weakly consistent (`weak') atomics as defined by the 2011 revision of the C standard. Weak atomics necessitate fewer constraints than SC atomics, but suffice for many multi-threaded algorithms. We confirm, via automatic model-checking, that we correctly implement the semantics in accordance with the C standard. A case study on a circular buffer suggests that on average circuits synthesised from programs that schedule atomics correctly can be 6× faster than an existing lock-based implementation of atomics, that weak atomics can yield a further 1.3× speedup, and that pipelining can yield a further 1.3× speedup.

FA-Stack: A Fast Array-Based Stack with Wait-Free Progress Guarantee

The prevalence of multicore processors necessitates the design of efficient concurrent data structures. Shared concurrent stacks are widely used as inter-thread communication structures in parallel applications. Wait-free stacks can ensure that each thread completes operations on them in a finite number of steps. This characteristic is valuable for parallel applications and operating systems, especially in real-time environments. Unfortunately, because wait-free algorithms are typically hard to design and considered inefficient, practical wait-free stacks are rare. In this paper, we present a practical, fast array-based concurrent stack with wait-free progress guarantee, named FA-Stack. A series of optimizations are proposed to bound the number of steps required to complete every push and pop operation. In addition, FA-Stack adopts a time-stamped scheme to reclaim memory. We use linearizability , a correctness condition for concurrent data structures, to prove that FA-Stack is a wait-free linearizable stack with respect to the Last in First Out (LIFO) semantics. Our evaluation with representative benchmarks shows that FA-Stack is an efficient wait-free stack. For example, compared to Sim-Stack (a state-of-the-art wait-free stack), FA-Stack improves the throughput of halfhalf benchmark by up to 2.4 $\times$ .

Lock-Free Transactional Transformation for Linked Data Structures

Nonblocking data structures allow scalable and thread-safe access to shared data. They provide individual operations that appear to execute atomically. However, it is often desirable to execute multiple operations atomically in a transactional manner. Previous solutions, such as Software Transactional Memory (STM) and transactional boosting, manage transaction synchronization separately from the underlying data structure’s thread synchronization. Although this reduces programming effort, it leads to overhead associated with additional synchronization and the need to rollback aborted transactions. In this work, we present a new methodology for transforming high-performance lock-free linked data structures into high-performance lock-free transactional linked data structures without revamping the data structures’ original synchronization design. Our approach leverages the semantic knowledge of the data structure to eliminate the overhead of false conflicts and rollbacks. We encapsulate all operations, operands, and transaction status in a transaction descriptor, which is shared among the nodes accessed by the same transaction. We coordinate threads to help finish the remaining operations of delayed transactions based on their transaction descriptors. When a transaction fails, we recover the correct abstract state by reversely interpreting the logical status of a node. We also present an obstruction-free version of our algorithm that can be applied to dynamic execution scenarios and an example of our approach applied to a hash map. In our experimental evaluation using transactions with randomly generated operations, our lock-free transactional data structures outperform the transactional boosted ones by 70% on average. They also outperform the alternative STM-based approaches by a factor of 2 to 13 across all scenarios. More importantly, we achieve 4,700 to 915,000 times fewer spurious aborts than the alternatives.

JACK2: An MPI-based communication library with non-blocking synchronization for asynchronous iterations

In this paper, we address the design of a communication library which particularly targets distributed iterative computing, including randomly executed asynchronous iterations. The well-known MPI programming framework is considered, upon which unique generic routines are proposed for both blocking and non-blocking communication modes. This allows for developing unique software applications to experiment both classical and asynchronous iterative methods through the same programming pattern. Convergence detection issues are investigated on pure algorithmic aspects, from which we provide an efficient exact approach to compute global convergence residual norms, by means of non-blocking synchronization. Point-to-point message reception and sending requests are carefully handled in view of producing the least possible delays about transmitted iterative data. Extensive experiments with an existing MPI-based scientific application validate both the proposed MPI-like programming framework and design options to achieve best performances of asynchronous iterative computing.

A persistent lock-free queue for non-volatile memory

Non-volatile memory is expected to coexist with (or even displace) volatile DRAM for main memory in upcoming architectures. This has led to increasing interest in the problem of designing and specifying durable data structures that can recover from system crashes. Data structures may be designed to satisfy stricter or weaker durability guarantees to provide a balance between the strength of the provided guarantees and performance overhead. This paper proposes three novel implementations of a concurrent lock-free queue. These implementations illustrate algorithmic challenges in building persistent lock-free data structures with different levels of durability guarantees. In presenting these challenges, the proposed algorithmic designs, and the different durability guarantees, we hope to shed light on ways to build a wide variety of durable data structures. We implemented the various designs and compared their performance overhead to a simple queue design for standard (volatile) memory.

Checkpointing distributed application running on mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a type of wireless network consisting of a set of self-configured mobile hosts that can communicate with each other using wireless links without the assistance of any fixed infrastructure. This has made it possible for us to create distributed mobile computing applications and has also brought several new challenges in the field of distributed algorithm design. Checkpointing is a well explored fault tolerance technique for the wired and cellular mobile networks. However, it is not directly applicable to MANET owing to its dynamic topology, limited availability of stable storage, partitioning and the absence of fixed infrastructure. In this paper, we propose an adaptive, coordinated and non-blocking checkpointing algorithm to provide fault tolerance in cluster-based MANET, where only a minimum number of mobile hosts in the cluster should take checkpoints. The performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed scheme requires less coordinating-message cost and performs well compared to the related previous works.

Adaptive lock-free data structures in Haskell: a general method for concurrent implementation swapping

A key part of implementing high-level languages is providing built- in and default data structures. Yet selecting good defaults is hard. A mutable data structure’s workload is not known in advance, and it may shift over its lifetime—e.g., between read-heavy and write- heavy, or from heavy contention by multiple threads to single- threaded or low-frequency use. One idea is to switch implementa- tions adaptively, but it is nontrivial to switch the implementation of a concurrent data structure at runtime. Performing the transition requires a concurrent snapshot of data structure contents, which normally demands special engineering in the data structure’s de- sign. However, in this paper we identify and formalize an relevant property of lock-free algorithms. Namely, lock-freedom is su cient to guarantee that freezing memory locations in an arbitrary order will result in a valid snapshot. Several functional languages have data structures that freeze and thaw, transitioning between mutable and immutable, such as Haskell vectors and Clojure transients, but these enable only single-threaded writers. We generalize this approach to augment an arbitrary lock-free data structure with the ability to gradually freeze and optionally transition to a new representation. This aug- mentation doesn’t require changing the algorithm or code for the data structure, only replacing its datatype for mutable references with a freezable variant. In this paper, we present an algorithm for lifting plain to adaptive data and prove that the resulting hy- brid data structure is itself lock-free, linearizable, and simulates the original. We also perform an empirical case study in the context of heating up and cooling down concurrent maps.

Compresión BZIP2 optimizada usando colas libres de bloqueo

Debido a que la tendencia actual es tener más y más procesadores (cores) disponibles en cada computadora, la escalabilidad de las estructuras de datos usadas en programación paralela debe ser considerada cuidadosamente, para así garantizar que ellas saquen ventaja de los procesadores disponibles. Debido al aumento en la contención, usualmente las estructuras de datos basadas en bloqueos no mejoran su rendimiento proporcionalmente al incrementar el número de procesadores. El uso de estructuras de datos libres de bloqueos bien diseñadas, tales como las colas first in-first out, puede mejorar el rendimiento de un programa paralelo, cuando hay varios procesadores disponibles. En este trabajo se diseña e implementa una versión paralela de bzip2, un programa para compresión y descompresión de datos muy popular, usando colas libres de bloqueos en lugar de las basadas en bloqueos, y aplicando una estrategia de dos buffers de salida. Se compara el rendimiento de la implementación libre de bloqueos contra implementaciones basadas en bloqueos. Se midió el tiempo de compresión usando diferente número de procesadores y diferentes tamaños de bloques. Coincidiendo con la hipótesis de trabajo, los resultados muestran que la implementación paralela libre de bloqueos supera las otras implementaciones.

Type-assisted automatic garbage collection for lock-free data structures

We introduce Isolde, an automatic garbage collection scheme designed specifically for managing memory in lock-free data structures, such as stacks, lists, maps and queues. Isolde exists as a plug-in memory manager, designed to sit on-top of another memory manager, and use it's allocator and reclaimer (if exists). Isolde treats a lock-free data structure as a logical heap, isolated from the rest of the program. This allows garbage collection outside of Isolde to take place without affecting the lock-free data structure. Isolde further manages objects allocated on a Isolde heap in a fully concurrent manner, allowing garbage collection to incrementally remove garbage without stopping other threads doing work.

SKIRT: Hybrid parallelization of radiative transfer simulations

We describe the design, implementation and performance of the new hybrid parallelization scheme in our Monte Carlo radiative transfer code SKIRT, which has been used extensively for modeling the continuum radiation of dusty astrophysical systems including late-type galaxies and dusty tori. The hybrid scheme combines distributed memory parallelization, using the standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) to communicate between processes, and shared memory parallelization, providing multiple execution threads within each process to avoid duplication of data structures. The synchronization between multiple threads is accomplished through atomic operations without high-level locking (also called lock-free programming). This improves the scaling behavior of the code and substantially simplifies the implementation of the hybrid scheme. The result is an extremely flexible solution that adjusts to the number of available nodes, processors and memory, and consequently performs well on a wide variety of computing architectures.

Verifying Invariants of Lock-Free Data Structures with Rely-Guarantee and Refinement Types

Verifying invariants of fine-grained concurrent data structures is challenging, because interference from other threads may occur at any time. We propose a new way of proving invariants of fine-grained concurrent data structures: applying rely-guarantee reasoning to references in the concurrent setting. Rely-guarantee applied to references can verify bounds on thread interference without requiring a whole program to be verified. This article provides three new results. First, it provides a new approach to preserving invariants and restricting usage of concurrent data structures. Our approach targets a space between simple type systems and modern concurrent program logics, offering an intermediate point between unverified code and full verification. Furthermore, it avoids sealing concurrent data structure implementations and can interact safely with unverified imperative code. Second, we demonstrate the approach’s broad applicability through a series of case studies, using two implementations: an axiomatic C oq domain-specific language and a library for Liquid Haskell. Third, these two implementations allow us to compare and contrast verifications by interactive proof (C oq ) and a weaker form that can be expressed using automatically-discharged dependent refinement types (Liquid Haskell).

Making Local Algorithms Wait-Free: the Case of Ring Coloring

When considering distributed computing, reliable message-passing synchronous systems on the one side, and asynchronous failure-prone shared-memory systems on the other side, remain two quite independently studied ends of the relia-bility/asynchrony spectrum. The concept of locality of a computation is central to the first one, while the concept of wait-freedom is central to the second one. The paper proposes a new DECOUPLED model in an attempt to reconcile these two worlds. It consists of a synchronous and reliable communication graph of n nodes, and on top a set of asynchronous crash-prone processes, each attached to a communication node. To illustrate the DECOUPLED model, the paper presents an asynchronous 3-coloring algorithm for the processes of a ring. From the processes point of view, the This article is part Theory Comput Syst algorithm is wait-free. From a locality point of view, each process uses information only from processes at distance O(log * n) from it. This local wait-free algorithm is based on an extension of the classical Cole and Vishkin's vertex coloring algorithm in which the processes are not required to start simultaneously.

Black-box Concurrent Data Structures for NUMA Architectures

High-performance servers are Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) machines. To fully leverage these machines, programmers need efficient concurrent data structures that are aware of the NUMA performance artifacts. We propose Node Replication (NR), a black-box approach to obtaining such data structures. NR takes an arbitrary sequential data structure and automatically transforms it into a NUMA-aware concurrent data structure satisfying linearizability. Using NR requires no expertise in concurrent data structure design, and the result is free of concurrency bugs. NR draws ideas from two disciplines: shared-memory algorithms and distributed systems. Briefly, NR implements a NUMA-aware shared log, and then uses the log to replicate data structures consistently across NUMA nodes. NR is best suited for contended data structures, where it can outperform lock-free algorithms by 3.1x, and lock-based solutions by 30x. To show the benefits of NR to a real application, we apply NR to the data structures of Redis, an in-memory storage system. The result outperforms other methods by up to 14x. The cost of NR is additional memory for its log and replicas.

Black-box Concurrent Data Structures for NUMA Architectures

High-performance servers are Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) machines. To fully leverage these machines, programmers need efficient concurrent data structures that are aware of the NUMA performance artifacts. We propose Node Replication (NR), a black-box approach to obtaining such data structures. NR takes an arbitrary sequential data structure and automatically transforms it into a NUMA-aware concurrent data structure satisfying linearizability. Using NR requires no expertise in concurrent data structure design, and the result is free of concurrency bugs. NR draws ideas from two disciplines: shared-memory algorithms and distributed systems. Briefly, NR implements a NUMA-aware shared log, and then uses the log to replicate data structures consistently across NUMA nodes. NR is best suited for contended data structures, where it can outperform lock-free algorithms by 3.1x, and lock-based solutions by 30x. To show the benefits of NR to a real application, we apply NR to the data structures of Redis, an in-memory storage system. The result outperforms other methods by up to 14x. The cost of NR is additional memory for its log and replicas.

Lock-Free Binary Search Tree Based on Leaf Search

Binary search tree is one of the most important data structures in program design. This article proposes a novel lock-free algorithm, which can implement the lock-free operations, such as search, insert and delete, using compare and swap (CAS). Unlike the previous studies of handling the inside node in a tree, the authors' algorithm handles the insert and delete operations by considering of the subtree. This article presents the details of the lock-free algorithm, which can effectively reduce the contention between the update operations. The experiment compares the algorithm with other two lock-free algorithms by throughput. Evaluation results show that the throughput of the algorithm outperforms that of the other two concurrent BSTs when the number of threads is more than 4. The authors' algorithm will be competitive when the concurrency is high.

POSTER

Lock-free algorithms guarantee progress by having threads help one another. Complex lock-free operations facilitate helping by creating descriptor objects that describe how other threads should help them. In many lock-free algorithms, a new descriptor is allocated for each operation. After an operation completes, its descriptor must be reclaimed by a memory reclamation scheme. Allocating and reclaiming descriptors introduces significant space and time overhead. We present a transformation for a class of lock-free algorithms that allows each thread to efficiently reuse a single descriptor. Experiments on a variety of workloads show that our transformation yields significant improvements over implementations that reclaim descriptors.