Design and Evaluation of Scalable Concurrent Queues for Many-Core Architectures

Abstract

As core counts increase and as heterogeneity becomes more common in parallel computing, we face the prospect of pro gramming hundreds or even thousands of concurrent threads in a single shared-memory system. At these scales, even highly-efficient concurrent algorithms and data structures can become bottlenecks, unless they are designed from the ground up with throughput as their primary goal.

In this paper, we present three contributions: (1) a characterization of queue designs in terms of modern multi- and many-core architectures, (2) the design of a high-throughput concurrent FIFO queue for many-core architectures that avoids the bottlenecks common in modern queue designs, and (3) a thorough evaluation of concurrent queue throughput across CPU, GPU, and co-processor devices. Our evaluation shows that focusing on throughput, rather than progress guarantees, allows our queue to scale to as much as three orders of magnitude (1000X) faster than lock-free and combining queues on GPU platforms and two times (2X) faster on CPU devices. These results deliver critical insight into the design of data structures for highly concurrent systems: (1) progress guarantees do not guarantee scalability, and (2) allowing an algorithm to block can actually increase throughput.