FlowPools: A Lock-Free Deterministic Concurrent Dataflow Abstraction

• Published in: Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing pp. 158 - 173
• Main Authors: Prokopec, Aleksandar, Miller, Heather, Schlatter, Tobias, Haller, Philipp, Odersky, Martin
• Format: Book Chapter Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2012
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Concurrent data-structure; Dataflow; Deterministic parallelism
• ISBN: 9783642376573; 3642376576; 9783642376580; 3642376584
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-37658-0_11

Implementing correct and deterministic parallel programs is challenging. Even though concurrency constructs exist in popular programming languages to facilitate the task of deterministic parallel programming, they are often too low level, or do not compose well due to underlying blocking mechanisms. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a fundamental data structure for composable deterministic parallel dataflow computation through the use of functional programming abstractions. Additionally, we provide a correctness proof, showing that the implementation is linearizable, lock-free, and deterministic. Finally, we show experimental results which compare our FlowPool against corresponding operations on other concurrent data structures, and show that in addition to offering new capabilities, FlowPools reduce insertion time by 49 − 54% on a 4-core i7 machine with respect to comparable concurrent queue data structures in the Java standard library.