Supporting Lock-Free Composition of Concurrent Data Objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lock-free methodology for composing concurrent data objects, enabling atomic operations while maintaining high concurrency and linearizability, thus improving composability without sacrificing performance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach to unify linearization points for lock-free objects, facilitating atomic composition and move operations across diverse concurrent data structures.

Findings

Operations retain their original performance

Methodology enables atomic move operations

Supports composition of highly concurrent objects

Abstract

Lock-free data objects offer several advantages over their blocking counterparts, such as being immune to deadlocks and convoying and, more importantly, being highly concurrent. But they share a common disadvantage in that the operations they provide are difficult to compose into larger atomic operations while still guaranteeing lock-freedom. We present a lock-free methodology for composing highly concurrent linearizable objects together by unifying their linearization points. This makes it possible to relatively easily introduce atomic lock-free move operations to a wide range of concurrent objects. Experimental evaluation has shown that the operations originally supported by the data objects keep their performance behavior under our methodology.