Lock cohorting: A general technique for designing NUMA locks

David Dice*, Virendra J. Marathe, Nir Shavit

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

46 Scopus citations

Abstract

Multicore machines are quickly shifting to NUMA and CC-NUMA architectures, making scalable NUMAaware locking algorithms, ones that take into account the machine's nonuniform memory and caching hierarchy, ever more important. This article presents lock cohorting, a general new technique for designing NUMA-aware locks that is as simple as it is powerful. Lock cohorting allows one to transform any spin-lock algorithm, with minimal nonintrusive changes, into a scalable NUMA-aware spin-lock. Our new cohorting technique allows us to easily create NUMA-aware versions of the TATAS-Backoff, CLH, MCS, and ticket locks, to name a few. Moreover, it allows us to derive a CLH-based cohort abortable lock, the first NUMA-aware queue lock to support abortability. We empirically compared the performance of cohort locks with prior NUMA-aware and classic NUMAoblivious locks on a synthetic micro-benchmark, a real world key-value store application memcached, as well as the libc memory allocator. Our results demonstrate that cohort locks perform as well or better than known locks when the load is low and significantly out-perform them as the load increases.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbera13
JournalACM Transactions on Parallel Computing
Volume1
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2015
Externally publishedYes

Funding

FundersFunder number
DoE ASCRER26116/DE-SC0008923
Intel corporations
National Science FoundationCCF-1301926, CCF-1217921, 1301926
Oracle

    Keywords

    • Concurrency
    • Hierarchical locks
    • Locks
    • Multicore
    • Mutex
    • Mutual exclusion
    • NUMA
    • Spin locks

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