Author : Rice University. Dept. of Computer Science
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 17 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (353 download)
Book Synopsis Replacing Locks by Higher-level Primitives by : Rice University. Dept. of Computer Science
Download or read book Replacing Locks by Higher-level Primitives written by Rice University. Dept. of Computer Science and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: "Locks are used in shared memory parallel programs to achieve a variety of synchronization objectives. They may provide mutual exclusion for a critical section, or they may provide synchronized access to a task queue. In the former case, no ordering is implied between data operations outside of the critical sections, while in the latter case the operations preceeding the enqueue of a task are ordered before the operations following a dequeue of that task. In this paper we argue that many uses of locks can be replaced by higher-level primitives that directly express the intended behavior, such as, for example, enqueue and dequeue operations on a task queue. This approach not only simplifies the programming model, but also allows a more efficient implementation. By making the intended use explicit, we can tailor the implementation of each primitive accordingly, thereby achieving reductions in latency and communication overhead. Synchronization latency has been shown to be one of the major impediments for achieving high performance, especially on software distributed shared memory systems. We demonstrate the benefits of our approach by comparing the performance on the TreadMarks distributed shared memory system of lock-based implementations of four applications (TSP, Quicksort, Water, and ILINK) to new implementations using the higher- level primitives. For each of the four applications, the high-level primitives lead to simpler programs with better performance."