Supporting lock-free composition of concurrent data objects

Abstract

Lock-free data objects offer several advantages over their blocking counterparts, such as being immune to deadlocks and convoying and, more importantly, being highly concurrent. However, composing the operations they provide into larger atomic operations, while still guaranteeing efficiency and lock-freedom, is a challenging algorithmic task. We present a lock-free methodology for composing highly concurrent linearizable objects together by unifying their linearization points. This makes it possible to relatively easily introduce atomic lock-free move operations to a wide range of concurrent objects. Experimental evaluation has shown that the operations originally supported by the data objects keep their performance behavior under our methodology.