A highly-efficient wait-free universal construction

  • Authors:

  • Panagiota Fatourou;Nikolaos D. Kallimanis

  • Affiliations:

  • FORTH ICS, Heraklion, Greece;Department of Compuer Science, University of Ioannina, Ioannina, Greece

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We present a new simple wait-free universal construction, called Sim, that uses just a Fetch&Add and an LL/SC object and performs a constant number of shared memory accesses. We have implemented SIM in a real shared-memory machine. In theory terms, our practical version of SIM, called P-SIM, has worse complexity than its theoretical analog; in practice though, we experimentally show that P-SIM outperforms several state-of-the-art lock-based and lock-free techniques, and this given that it is wait-free, i.e., that it satisfies a stronger progress condition than all the algorithms it outperforms. We have used P-SIM to get highly-efficient wait-free implementations of stacks and queues. Our experiments show that our implementations outperform the currently state-of-the-art shared stack and queue implementations which ensure only weaker progress properties than wait-freedom.