Concurrent Access of Priority Queues
IEEE Transactions on Computers
Parallel discrete event simulation on shared-memory multiprocessors
ANSS '91 Proceedings of the 24th annual symposium on Simulation
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The heap is an important data structure used as a priority queue in a wide variety of parallel algorithms (e.g., multiprocessor scheduling, branch-and-bound). In these algorithms, contention for the shared heap limits the obtainable speedup. This paper presents an approach to allow concurrent insertions and deletions on the heap in a shared-memory multiprocessor. Our scheme has much smaller overhead and gives a much better performance than a previously reported scheme. The scheme also retains the strict priority ordering of the serial-access heap algorithms; i.e., a delete operation returns the best key of all keys that have been inserted or are being inserted at the time delete is started. Our experimental results on the BBN Butterfly parallel processor demonstrate that the use of the concurrent-heap algorithms in parallel branch-and-bound improves its performance substantially.