Abstract
Designing an efficient concurrent data structure is a challenge that is not easy to meet. Intuitively, efficiency of an implementation is defined, in the first place, by its ability to process applied operations in parallel, without using unnecessary synchronization. As we show in this paper, even for a data structure as simple as a linked list used to implement the set type, the most efficient algorithms known so far are not concurrency-optimal: they may reject correct concurrent schedules. We propose a new algorithm for the list-based set based on a value-aware try-lock that we show to achieve optimal concurrency: it only rejects concurrent schedules that violate correctness of the implemented set type. We show that reaching this kind of optimality may be beneficial in practice. Our concurrency-optimal list-based set outperforms two state-of-the-art algorithms: the Lazy Linked List and the Harris-Michael List.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that this property refines the original notion of disjoint access parallelism (DAP) [7], trivially ensured by most linked-list implementations simply because all their operations “access” the head node and, thus, are allowed to conflict on the metadata.
- 2.
Here we adapt to list-based sets the notion of concurrency-optimality, introduced in [1] for generic search data structures.
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Aksenov, V., Gramoli, V., Kuznetsov, P., Shang, D., Ravi, S. (2021). Optimal Concurrency for List-Based Sets. In: Malyshkin, V. (eds) Parallel Computing Technologies. PaCT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12942. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86359-3_29
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