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Nonblocking k-Compare-Single-Swap

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Abstract

The current literature offers two extremes of nonblocking software synchronization support for concurrent data structure design: intricate designs of specific structures based on single-location operations such as compare-and-swap (CAS), and general-purpose multilocation transactional memory implementations. While the former are sometimes efficient, they are invariably hard to extend and generalize. The latter are flexible and general, but costly. This paper aims at a middle ground: reasonably efficient multilocation operations that are general enough to reduce the design difficulties of algorithms based on CAS alone.

We present an obstruction-free implementation of an atomic k -location-compare single-location-swap (KCSS) operation. KCSS allows for simple nonblocking manipulation of linked data structures by overcoming the key algorithmic difficulty in their design: making sure that while a pointer is being manipulated, neighboring parts of the data structure remain unchanged. Our algorithm is efficient in the common uncontended case: A successful k-location KCSS operation requires only two CAS operations, two stores, and 2k noncached loads when there is no contention. We therefore believe our results lend themselves to efficient and flexible nonblocking manipulation of list-based data structures in today’s architectures.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Burlington, MA, USA

    Victor Luchangco, Mark Moir & Nir Shavit

Authors
  1. Victor Luchangco
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  2. Mark Moir
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  3. Nir Shavit
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Victor Luchangco.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual ACM Symposium on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures, pages 314–323, San Diego, California, USA, 2003.

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Luchangco, V., Moir, M. & Shavit, N. Nonblocking k-Compare-Single-Swap. Theory Comput Syst 44, 39–66 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-008-9155-5

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