Monotonic counters: a new mechanism for thread synchronization

Abstract

Only a handful of fundamental mechanisms for synchronizing the access of concurrent threads to shared memory are widely implemented and used. These include locks, condition variables, semaphores, barriers, and monitors. In this paper, we introduce a new synchronization mechanism-monotonic counters-and make a case for its addition to this group. Unlike most other synchronization mechanisms, monotonic counters were designed primarily for multiprocessing, rather than for systems programming. Counters have a very simple definition: a counter object has a nonnegative value, an Increment operation, and a Check operation. Increment atomically increases the counter, and Check suspends until the counter reaches a specified level. We demonstrate that many practical thread synchronization patterns can be expressed more elegantly using counters than with other synchronization mechanisms. Of particular importance, the monotonicity of counters can be used to guarantee deterministic synchronization and the equivalence of multithreaded and sequential execution. In terms of implementation, counters are distinguished from traditional synchronization mechanisms, in that they have a dynamically varying number of thread suspension queues. We give several examples of multithreaded programs that use counter synchronization, and give an implementation of counters on top of locks and condition variables.