Lock-free Concurrent Data Structures

TL;DR

This paper provides an overview of lock-free concurrent data structures, emphasizing their importance in parallel programming for efficient data sharing and manipulation, and aims to educate readers on their design and usage.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive background and intuition on lock-free data structures, facilitating understanding and practical application in parallel programming.

Findings

Highlights the significance of lock-free data structures in parallel computing

Provides foundational knowledge for designing efficient concurrent algorithms

Aims to bridge theory and practice for programmers in concurrent environments

Abstract

Concurrent data structures are the data sharing side of parallel programming. Data structures give the means to the program to store data, but also provide operations to the program to access and manipulate these data. These operations are implemented through algorithms that have to be efficient. In the sequential setting, data structures are crucially important for the performance of the respective computation. In the parallel programming setting, their importance becomes more crucial because of the increased use of data and resource sharing for utilizing parallelism. The first and main goal of this chapter is to provide a sufficient background and intuition to help the interested reader to navigate in the complex research area of lock-free data structures. The second goal is to offer the programmer familiarity to the subject that will allow her to use truly concurrent methods.