Dynamic Memory ABP Work-Stealing


Authors


Abstract

The non-blocking work-stealing algorithm of Arora, Blumofe, and Plaxton (henceforth ABP work-stealing) is on its way to becoming the multiprocessor load balancing technology of choice in both Industry and Academia. This highly efficient scheme is based on a collection of array-based dequeues with low cost synchronization among local and stealing processes. Unfortunately, the algorithm's synchronization protocol is strongly based on the use of fixed size arrays, which are prone to overflows, especially in the multiprogrammed environments which they are designed for. This means that users must tailor the deque size to accommodate the effects of the hard-to-predict level of multiprogramming, and add expensive blocking overflow-management mechanisms. This paper presents the first dynamic memory work-stealing algorithm. As we show, the new algorithm dramatically increases robustness and memory efficiency, while causing applications no observable performance penalty.