Dynamic circular work-stealing deque

  • Authors:

  • David Chase;Yossi Lev

  • Affiliations:

  • Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Burlington, MA;Brown University & Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Burlington, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the seventeenth annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The non-blocking work-stealing algorithm of Arora, Blumofe, and Plaxton (henceforth ABP work-stealing) is on its way to becoming the multiprocessor load balancing technology of choice in both industry and academia. This highly efficient scheme is based on a collection of array-based double-ended queues (deques) with low cost synchronization among local and stealing processes. Unfortunately, the algorithm's synchronization protocol is strongly based on the use of fixed size arrays, which are prone to overflows, especially in the multiprogrammed environments for which they are designed. We present a work-stealing deque that does not have the overflow problem.The only ABP-style work-stealing algorithm that eliminates the overflow problem is the list-based one presented by Hendler, Lev and Shavit. Their algorithm indeed deals with the overflow problem, but it is complicated, and introduces a trade-off between the space and time complexity, due to the extra work required to maintain the list.Our new algorithm presents a simple lock-free work-stealing deque, which stores the elements in a cyclic array that can grow when it overflows. The algorithm has no limit other than integer overflow (and the system's memory size) on the number of elements that may be on the deque, and the total memory required is linear in the number of elements in the deque.