Integrating Non-blocking Synchronisation in Parallel Applications: Performance Advantages and Methodologies

Paper in proceeding, 2002

In this paper we investigate how performance and speedup of applications would be affected by using non-blocking rather than blocking synchronisation in parallel systems. The results obtained show that for many applications, non-blocking synchronisation lead to significant speedups for a fairly large number of processors, while it never slows the applications down. As part of this investigation this paper also provides a set of efficient and simple translations that show how typical blocking operations found in parallel applications, such as simple locks, queues and lock trees can be translated into non-blocking equivalents that use hardware primitives common in modern multiprocessor systems. With these translations this paper clearly demonstrates that it is easy for the application designer/programmer to replace the blocking operations commonly found on with non-blocking equivalents ones. For the empirical results a set of representative applications running on a large-scale ccNUMA machine were used.