Report Number: CS-TR-99-1624
Institution: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
Title: Non-blocking Synchronization and System Design
Author: Greenwald, Michael
Date: August 1999
Abstract: Non-blocking synchronization (NBS) has significant advantages over blocking synchronization in areas of fault-tolerance, system structure, portability, and performance. These advantages gain importance with the increased use of parallelism and multiprocessors, and as delays increase relative to processor speed. This thesis demonstrates that non-blocking synchronization is practical as the sole co-ordination mechanism in systems by showing that careful OS design eases implementation of efficient NBS, by demonstrating that DCAS (Double-Compare-and-Swap) is the necessary and sufficient primitive for implementing NBS, and by demonstrating that efficient hardware DCAS is practical for RISC processors. This thesis presents high-performance non-blocking implementations of common data-structures sufficient to implement an operating system kernel. I also present more general algorithms: non-blocking implementations of \casn\ and software transactional memory. Both have overhead proportional to the number of writes, support multi\--objects, and use a DCAS-based contention-reduction technique that is fault-tolerant and OS-independent yet performs as well as the best previously published techniques. I demonstrate that proposed OS implementations of DCAS are inefficient, and propose a design for efficient hardware DCAS specific to the R4000 but generalizable to other RISC processors.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/99/1624/CS-TR-99-1624.pdf