Drop the anchor: Lightweight memory management for non-blocking data structures

Anastasia Braginsky, Alex Kogan, Erez Petrank

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Efficient memory management of dynamic non-blocking data structures remains an important open question. Existing methods either sacrifice the ability to deallocate objects or reduce performance notably. In this paper, we present a novel technique, called Drop the Anchor, which significantly reduces the overhead associated with the memory management while reclaiming objects even in the presence of thread failures. We demonstrate this memory management scheme on the common linked list data structure. Using extensive evaluation, we show that Drop the Anchor significantly outperforms Hazard Pointers, the widely used technique for non-blocking memory management.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSPAA 2013 - Proceedings of the 25th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures
Pages33-42
Number of pages10
StatePublished - 2013
Event25th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 2013 - Montreal, QC, Canada
Duration: 23 Jul 201325 Jul 2013

Publication series

NameAnnual ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures

Conference

Conference25th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, SPAA 2013
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityMontreal, QC
Period23/07/1325/07/13

Keywords

  • Concurrent data structures
  • Hazard pointers
  • Linked list
  • Lock-freedom
  • Memory management
  • Parallel programming
  • Progress guarantee
  • Timestamps, freezing

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Hardware and Architecture

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Drop the anchor: Lightweight memory management for non-blocking data structures'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this