Performant Almost-Latch-Free Data Structures Using Epoch Protection

Abstract

Multi-core scalability presents a major implementation challenge for data system designers today. Traditional methods such as latching no longer scale in today’s highly parallel architectures. While the designer can make use of techniques such as latch-free programming to painstakingly design specialized, highly-performant solutions, such solutions are often intricate to build and difficult to modify in the face of evolving requirements. Of particular interest to data system designers is a class of data structures we call almost-latch-free; such data structures can be made scalable in the common case, but have rare complications (e.g., dynamic resizing) that prevent full latch-free implementations. In this work, we present a new programming framework called EPVS to make it easy to build such data structures. EPVS makes use of epoch protection to preserve performance in the common case of latch-free operations, while allowing users to specify critical sections that execute under mutual exclusion for the rare, non-latch-free operations. We showcase the use of EPVS-based concurrency primitives in a few practical systems to demonstrate its competitive performance and intuitive guarantees. EPVS is available in open source as part of Microsoft’s FASTER project [2, 3].