Abstract:

It is desirable to facilitate data communications among parallel computation threads without incurring nonessential synchronizations in parallel computing systems. The NonBlocking Buffer(NBB) is such a mechanism. However, the NBB mechanism has several severe drawbacks, including limited buffer size, inconvenient or even infeasible usage in multiple consumers/producers cases. Nonblocking List mechanism(NBL), which can handle these problems gracefully, is described in this article. The algorithms and formal proofs are also presented. Finally, experiments are done to test the validity and performance of the NBL mechanism. The NBL mechanism can be regarded as the linked list version of NBB.

Key words: parallel programming;distributed computing;thread;synchronization;blocking;real time;NBB;NBL;producer;consumer