Cool: [WayBack] Scalable spinlocks 1: array-based | The Infinite Loop
Last time we saw that spinlock implementations which only use a single synchronization variable (Test-And-Set Lock, Ticket Lock) don’t scale with growing numbers of threads. Today, I want to talk about two spinlock variants that scale. Namely the Graunke and Thakkar Lock1 (1989) and the Anderson Lock2 (1990). Their underlying key idea is to use one synchronization variable per thread instead of one for all threads, to reduce the amount of cache line invalidations when acquiring/releasing the lock. Both spinlock variants store the synchronization variables in an array. This means that there’s an upper bound on the maximum number of thread’s that can compete for the lock concurrently, which must be known a priori. In upcoming blog posts I’m going to show spinlock variants (the MCS Lock and the CLH Lock) that improve upon array-based spinlocks by removing this hard upper limit.
–jeroen
via: [WayBack] Scalable spinlocks 1: array-based | The Infinite Loop – David Berneda – Google+
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 