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Scaling Existing Lock-based Applications with Lock Elision.

The article considers scalability of multiuser computer systems which have lock-based computer programs which synchronize data shared between users. The difficulties of high-performance synchronization are acknowledged. Lock elision, an algorithm in which lock-based programs are executed on a lockle...

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Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 57; no. 3; pp. 52 - 57
Main Author: KLEEN, ANDI
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Mar2014
Subjects:
Synchronization
Time measurements
User interfaces
Text processing (Computer science)
Systems design
Computer systems
Computer programming
Computer software
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:The article considers scalability of multiuser computer systems which have lock-based computer programs which synchronize data shared between users. The difficulties of high-performance synchronization are acknowledged. Lock elision, an algorithm in which lock-based programs are executed on a lockless fast path under a cache-coherence protocol, is examined, particularly Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) and Restricted Transactional Memory (RTM), computer software created by high technology industries firm Intel Corp. for lock elision.