A Lock-Free Skiplist for Integrated Graphics Processing Units

Abstract

With the advent of computing systems with on-die integrated graphics processing unit (iGPU), new general-purpose GPU programming challenges have emerged from these heterogeneous processors. We propose a lock-free skiplist for Intel's integrated graphics processor that is optimized to achieve the best performance using the C for Media framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a lock-free data structure for iGPU. Experimental results show that our proposal is more compute-efficient than an existing discrete GPU implementation and outperforms state-of-the-art lock-free and lock-based skiplists for multi-core CPU, achieving up to 3.5x speedup. Additionally, energy savings of up to 300% are obtained when running different skiplist workloads on iGPU instead of CPU cores, hence further improving energy efficiency.