Abstract:
The thesis investigates non-blocking synchronization in shared memory systems, in particular in high performance shared memory multiprocessors and real-time shared memory systems. We explore the performance impact of non-blocking synchronization in high performance shared memory multiprocessors and the applicability of non-blocking synchronization in real-time systems. The performance advantage of non-blocking synchronization over mutual exclusion in shared memory multiprocessors has been advocated by the theory community for a long time. In this work, we try to make non-blocking synchronization appreciated by application designers and programmers through a sequence of results. First, we develop a non-blocking FIFO queue algorithm which is simple and can be used as a building block for applications and libraries. The algorithm is fast and scales very well in both symmetric and non-symmetric shared memory multiprocessors. Second, we implement a fine-grain parallel Quicksort using non-blocking synchronization. Although fine-grain parallelism has been thought to be inefficient for computations like sorting due to synchronization overhead,
