Communications of the ACM
Scaling Synchronization in Multicore Programs
Credit: Steve Ball
Designing software for modern multicore processors poses a dilemma. Traditional software designs, in which threads manipulate shared data, have limited scalability because synchronization of updates to shared data serializes threads and limits parallelism. Alternative distributed software designs, in which threads do not share mutable data, eliminate synchronization and offer better scalability. But distributed designs make it challenging to implement features that shared data structures naturally provide, such as dynamic load balancing and strong consistency guarantees, and are simply not a good fit for every program.
Often, however, the performance of shared mutable data structures is limited by the synchronization methods in use today, whether lock-based or lock-free.
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