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Lock preemption is a common problem with twophase locking. While a transaction is still active, its locks may be preempted to avoid a deadlock or to satisfy the lock request of a higher-priority transaction. In general, the victim of preemption is aborted. This paper suggests that the victim could be continued and its work up to preemption could be saved if the preempted lock is restored on its...

Mutual exclusion primitives based on user-level atomic instructions (often called spin locks) have proven to be much more eecient than operating-system semaphores in situations where the contention on the semaphore is low. However, many of these spin lock schemes do not permit registration of ownership to be carried out atomically with acquisition, potentially leaving the ownership undetermined...

NUMA multicore machines are pervasive and many multithreaded applications are suffering from lock contention. To mitigate this issue, application and library developers can choose from the plethora of optimized mutex lock algorithms that have been designed over the past 25 years. Unfortunately, there is currently no broad study of the behavior of these optimized lock algorithms on realistic app...

Lock-free shared data structures in the setting of distributed computing have received a fair amount of attention. Major motivations of lock-free data structures include increasing fault tolerance of a (possibly heterogeneous) system and alleviating the problems associated with critical sections such as priority inversion and deadlock. For parallel computers with tightly-coupled processors and ...

Synchronization overhead may limit the number of applications that can take advantage of a shared-memory abstraction on top of emerging network of workstation organizations. While the programmer could spend additional efforts into getting rid of such overhead by restructuring the computation, this paper focuses on a simpler approach where the overhead of lock operations is hidden through lock p...

Mutual-exclusion locks are currently the most popular mechanism for interpro-cess synchronisation, largely due to their apparent simplicity and ease of implementation. In the parallel-computing environments that are increasingly commonplace in high-performance applications, this simplicity is deceptive: mutual exclusion does not scale well with large numbers of locks and many concurrent threads...

An object is lock-free if it guarantees that in a system where multiple threads are manipulating the object, some thread will complete its operation on the object in a finite number of steps, no matter what happens to other threads. More practically, lock-free programming is a technique to achieve thread safety without the use of locks, which are the current standard. Lock-free objects (LFOs) h...