Efficient Synchronization-Light Work Stealing
Rafael Custódio, Hervé Paulino, Guilherme Rito · 2023
Work Stealing (Ws) is a provably efficient scheduler of parallel computations. In WS each processor owns a deque that it uses as a call stack; when out of work, processors try to steal tasks from other processors' deques. Unfortunately, the concurrent nature of processors' deques entails expensive synchronization even when processors access their own deques. Recently, Rito and Paulino have found that the use of split deques allows to provably avoid most synchronization costs while keeping WS's asymptotically optimal expected runtime; in Low-Cost Work Stealing (LCWS) - the variant of WS introduced in their work - processors need not synchronization for most local accesses to their (split) deques.