Lockless-Spark98 is a version of the shared memory
Spark98 kernels
where the locks used by the original Spark98
Kernels were replaced by non blocking synchronisation
constructs.
Spark98 contains a set of sparse matrix kernels that perform a
set of sparse matrix vector product (SMVP) operations. The
multiplication of a sparse matrix by a dense vector is a
dominant part of many computer applications, including,
scientific computing applications, scheduling applications
based on linear programming and applications that simulate
physical systems. Spark98 kernels were developed by David R. O'Hallaron at
Carnegie Mellon University to facilitate building application
with a set of sparse matrix codes that are simple,
realistic, and portable.
We developed the Lockless-Spark98 Kernels together with the
Lockless-MiniSPLASH2 in order to:
-
facilitate the understanding of the benefits of non-blocking
synchronisation in realistic and simple parallel codes,
expected to play a central role in many parallel
applications.
-
facilitate the understanding of
using nonblocking synchronisation instead of using lock-based
one when building cache coherent shared memory
multiprocessors applications.
Availability
The source code of Lockless-Spark98 is developed under the
GNU
General Public License (GNU GPL).
The source code of our implementation and some related files
for our experiments can
be downloaded.
Papers
Philippas Tsigas, Yi Zhang, "Integrating Non-blocking
Synchronisation in Parallel Applications: Performance
Advantages and Methodologies", in the Proceedings of the
3rd ACM SIGSOFT, SIGMETRICS Workshop on Software and
Performance (WOSP ´02), pages: 55-67, ACM press.
(pdf file)
Related Local Projects
There are a number of projects run by the group looking into
non-blocking synchronisation from different aspects:
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