Scalable Data-structures with Hierarchical, Distributed Delegation

Abstract

Scaling data-structures up to the increasing number of cores provided by modern systems is challenging. The quest for scalability is complicated by the non-uniform memory accesses (NUMA) of multi-socket machines that often prohibit the effective use of data-structures that span memory localities. Conventional shared memory data-structures using efficient non-blocking or lock-based implementations inevitably suffer from cache-coherency overheads, and non-local memory accesses between sockets. Multi-socket systems are common in cloud hardware, and many products are pushing shared memory systems to greater scales, thus making the ability to scale data-structures all the more pressing. In this paper, we present the Distributed, Delegated Parallel Sections (DPS) runtime system that uses message-passing to move the computation on portions of data-structures between memory localities, while leveraging efficient shared memory implementations within each locality to harness efficient parallelism. We show through a series of data-structure scalability evaluations, and through an adaptation of memcached, that DPS enables strong data-structure scalability. DPS provides more than a factor of 3.1 improvements in throughput, and 23x decreases in tail latency for memcached.