Nowa: A Wait-Free Continuation-Stealing Concurrency Platform

It is an ongoing challenge to efficiently use parallelism with today’s multi- and many-core processors. Scalability becomes more crucial than ever with the rapidly growing number of processing elements in many-core systems that operate in data centres and embedded domains. Guaranteeing scalability is often ensured by using fully-strict fork/join concurrency, which is the prevalent approach used by concurrency platforms like Cilk. The runtime systems employed by those platforms typically resort to lock-based synchronisation due to the complex interactions of data structures within the runtime. However, locking limits scalability severely. With the availability of commercial off-the-shelf systems with hundreds of logical cores, this is becoming a problem for an increasing number of systems.This paper presents Nowa, a novel wait-free approach to arbitrate the plentiful concurrent strands managed by a concurrency platform’s runtime system. The wait-free approach is enabled by exploiting inherent properties of fully-strict fork/join concurrency, and hence is potentially applicable for every continuation-stealing runtime system of a concurrency platform. We have implemented Nowa and compared it with existing runtime systems, including Cilk Plus, and Threading Building Blocks (TBB), which employ a lock-based approach. Our evaluation results show that the wait-free implementation increases the performance up to 1.64× compared to lock-based ones, on a system with 256 hardware threads. The performance increased by 1.17× on average, while no but one benchmark exhibited performance regression. Compared against OpenMP tasks using Clang’s libomp, Nowa outperforms OpenMP by 8.68× on average.