License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Germany license (CC BY 3.0 DE)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/DARTS.4.2.2
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-89704
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2018/8970/
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Nemitz, Catherine E. ; Amert, Tanya ; Anderson, James H.

Using Lock Servers to Scale Real-Time Locking Protocols: Chasing Ever-Increasing Core Counts (Artifact)

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DARTS-4-2-2.pdf (0.3 MB)

Abstract

During the past decade, parallelism-related issues have been at the forefront of real-time systems research due to the advent of multicore technologies. In the coming years, such issues will loom ever larger due to increasing core counts. Having more cores means a greater potential exists for platform capacity loss when the available parallelism cannot be fully exploited. In this work, such capacity loss is considered in the context of real-time locking protocols. In this context, lock nesting becomes a key concern as it can result in transitive blocking chains that force tasks to execute sequentially unnecessarily. Such chains can be quite long on a larger machine. Contention-sensitive real-time locking protocols have been proposed as a means of ``breaking'' transitive blocking chains, but such protocols tend to have high overhead due to more complicated lock/unlock logic. To ease such overhead, the usage of lock servers is considered herein. In particular, four specific lock-server paradigms are proposed and many nuances concerning their deployment are explored. Experiments are presented that show that, by executing cache hot, lock servers can enable reductions in lock/unlock overhead of up to 86\%. Such reductions make contention-sensitive protocols a viable approach in practice. This artifact contains the implementation of two contention-sensitive locking protocol variants implemented with four proposed lock-server paradigms, as well as the experiments with which they were evaluated.

BibTeX - Entry

@Article{nemitz_et_al:DARTS:2018:8970,
  author =	{Catherine E. Nemitz and Tanya Amert and James H. Anderson},
  title =	{{Using Lock Servers to Scale Real-Time Locking Protocols: Chasing Ever-Increasing Core Counts (Artifact)}},
  pages =	{2:1--2:3},
  journal =	{Dagstuhl Artifacts Series},
  ISSN =	{2509-8195},
  year =	{2018},
  volume =	{4},
  number =	{2},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2018/8970},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-89704},
  doi =		{10.4230/DARTS.4.2.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: multiprocess locking protocols, nested locks, priority-inversion blocking, reader/writer locks, real-time locking protocols}
}

Keywords: multiprocess locking protocols, nested locks, priority-inversion blocking, reader/writer locks, real-time locking protocols
Collection: DARTS, Volume 4, Issue 2
Related Scholarly Article: http://dx.doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2018.25
Issue Date: 2018
Date of publication: 20.06.2018

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