Compiler-driven approach for automating nonblocking synchronization in concurrent data abstractions

This paper presents an extended version of our previous work on using compiler technology to automatically convert sequential C++ data abstractions, for example, queues, stacks, maps, and trees, to concurrent lock-free implementations. A key difference between our work and existing research in software transactional memory (STM) is that our compiler-based approach automatically selects the best state-of-the-practice nonblocking synchronization method for the underlying sequential implementation of the data structure. The extended material includes a broader collection of the state-of-the-practice lock-free synchronization techniques, additional formal correctness proofs of the overall integration of the different synchronizations in our system, and a more comprehensive experimental study of the integrated techniques. We evaluate our compiler-generated nonblocking data structures both by using a collection of micro-benchmarks, including the Synchrobench suite, and by using a multi-threaded application Dedup from PARSEC. Our automatically synchronized code attains performance competitive to that of concurrent data structures manually-written by experts and much better performance than heavier-weight support by STM.