Scalable producer-consumer pools based on elimination-diffraction trees. (English)
D’Ambra, Pasqua (ed.) et al., Euro-Par 2010 ‒ parallel processing. 16th international Euro-Par conference, Ischia, Italy, August 31 ‒ September 3, 2010. Proceedings, Part II. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-642-15290-0/pbk). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6272, 151-162 (2010).
Summary: Producer-consumer pools, that is, collections of unordered objects or tasks, are a fundamental element of modern multiprocessor software and a target of extensive research and development. For example, there are three common ways to implement such pools in the Java JDK6.0: the SynchronousQueue, the LinkedBlockingQueue, and the ConcurrentLinkedQueue. Unfortunately, most pool implementations, including the ones in the JDK, are based on centralized structures like a queue or a stack, and thus are limited in their scalability. This paper presents the ED-Tree, a distributed pool structure based on a combination of the elimination-tree and diffracting-tree paradigms, allowing high degrees of parallelism with reduced contention. We use the ED-Tree to provide new pool implementations that compete with those of the JDK. In experiments on a 128 way Sun Maramba multicore machine, we show that ED-Tree based pools scale well, outperforming the corresponding algorithms in the JDK6.0 by a factor of 10 or more at high concurrency levels, while providing similar performance at low levels.