Managing Concurrent Access for Shared Memory Active Messages

• Venue: IPPS '98 Proceedings of the 12th. International Parallel Processing Symposium on International Parallel Processing Symposium
• Year: 1998

Passing messages through shared memory plays an important role on symmetric multiprocessors and on Clumps. The management of concurrent access to message queues is an important aspect of design for shared memory message-passing systems. Using both microbenchmarks and applications, this paper compares the performanee of concurrent access algorithms for passing active messages on a Sun Enterprise 5000 server. The paper presents a new lock-free algorithm that provides many of the advantages of nonblocking algorithms while avoiding the overhead of true non-blocking behaviol. The lock-free algorithm couples synchronization tightly to the data structure and demonstrates application performance superior to all others studied. The success of this algorithm implies that other practical problems might also benefit from a reexamination of the nonblocking literature.