Enhanced Non-Blocking Buffer: A High Performance Non-Blocking Message Communication Mechanism
Xiaojian Liu, Yi Cheng Ren, Huadong Dai · 2010
In high performance computing, it is desirable for threads to communicate with each other without incurring nonessential mutual exclusion. Various non-blocking mechanisms are proposed in the literature. However, the previous studies have the problem of message overwritten or repeatedly read. And none of them can handle the dispatcher/workers processing model well. Utilizing the primitive Compare and Swap, which can be executed atomically on most hardware platforms, the Enhanced Nonblocking Buffer (ENBB) mechanism described in this article is free of these drawbacks. The algorithms and their proofs are also presented. Lastly, experiments show the ENBB mechanism is both bug-free and high performance.