Validating performance and simplicity of highly concurrent data structures utilitizing the ATAC broadcast mechanism

Abstract

I evaluate the ATAC broadcast mechanism as the foundation for a new paradigm in the design of highly scalable concurrent data structures. Shared memory communication is replaced, alleviating the contention that prevents data structures from achieving high performance on the next generation of manycore computers. The alternative model utilizes thread local memory and relies on the ATAC broadcast for inter-core communication, thus avoiding the complicated protocols that contemporary data structures use to mitigate contention. I explain the design of the ATAC barrier and run benchmarking to validate its high performance relative to existing barriers. I explore several concurrent hash map designs built using the ATAC paradigm and evaluate their performance, explaining the memory access patterns under which they achieve scalability.