MxTasks: How to Make Efficient Synchronization and Prefetching Easy

The hardware environment has changed rapidly in recent years: Many cores, multiple sockets, and large amounts of main memory have become a commodity. To benefit from these highly parallel systems, the software has to be adapted. Sophisticated latch-free data structures and algorithms are often meant to address the situation. But they are cumbersome to develop and may still not provide the desired scalability. As a remedy, we present MxTasking, a task-based framework that assists the design of latch-free and parallel data structures. MxTasking eases the information exchange between applications and the operating system, resulting in novel opportunities to manage resources in a truly hardware- and application-conscious way.