Research Project: A Lock-free thread library

Project description

LFthreads is a thread library whose synchronization is entirely based on lock-free techniques, which means that no spin-locks or similar synchronization mechanisms are employed in the implementation of the multithreading. This implies that processors are always able to do useful work and is achieved by a new synchronization mechanism that does not need any special kernel support. Since lock-freeness is highly desirable in multiprocessors due to its advantages in performance, fault-tolerance, convoy- and deadlock-avoidance, there is an increased demand in lock-free methods in multiprocessor applications, hence also in multiprocessor system services. This is why the existence of a lock-free multithreading library is important.

See also the group's related projects: NBmalloc, a non-blocking memory allocator, NOBLE, a software library of lock-free shared data objects, WARPing, Lockless-Spark98 and Lockless-MiniSPLASH2.

More information will be added as this project progresses.

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Availability

The source code of LFthreads is currently not ready for publication. LFthreads is expected to be released in due time under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). If you are interested in the source code of our implementation at this time send a request to me.

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Publications

• LFthreads: A lock-free thread library or "Blocking without locking",
  Anders Gidenstam and Marina Papatriantafilou,
  Technical Report 2005:20, Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of technology, 2005.

• Efficient and Reliable Lock-Free Memory Reclamation Based on Reference Counting,
  Anders Gidenstam, Marina Papatriantafilou, Håkan Sundell and Philippas Tsigas,
  Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Parallel Architectures, Algorithms, and Networks (I-SPAN 2005), pages 202 - 207, IEEE Computer Society, 2005.

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