How to implement any concurrent data structure for modern servers

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method to implement any concurrent data structure. Our method produces implementations that work particularly well in non-uniform memory access (NUMA) machines. Due to recent architecture trends, highly concurrent servers today are NUMA machines, where the cost of accessing a memory location is not the same across every core. To fully leverage these machines, programmers need efficient concurrent data structures that are aware of the NUMA performance artifacts.We propose Node Replication (NR), a black-box approach to obtaining such data structures. NR takes an arbitrary sequential data structure and automatically transforms it into a NUMA-aware concurrent data structure satisfying linearizability. Using NR requires no expertise in concurrent data structure design, and the result is free of concurrency bugs. NR draws ideas from two disciplines: shared-memory algorithms and distributed systems. Briefly, NR implements a NUMA-aware shared log, and then uses the log to replicate data structures consistently across NUMA nodes. The cost of NR is additional memory for its log and replicas.