Efficient Lock-Free Work-stealing Iterators for Data-Parallel Collections

Aleksandar Prokopec, Dmitry Petrashko, Martin Odersky
Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing 2015 (PDP 2015)

Abstract

High-level data-structures are an important foundation for most applications. With the rise of multicores, there is a trend of supporting data-parallel collection operations in general purpose programming languages. However, these operations often incur high-level abstraction and scheduling penalties.

We present a generic data-parallel collections design based on work-stealing for shared-memory architectures that overcomes abstraction penalties through callsite specialization of data-parallel operation instances. Moreover, we introduce work-stealing iterators that allow more fine-grained and efficient work-stealing. By eliminating abstraction penalties and making work-stealing data-structure-aware we achieve several dozen times better performance compared to existing JVM-based approaches.

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