NDLI: XMalloc: A Scalable Lock-free Dynamic Memory Allocator for Many-core Machines

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Xiaohuang Huang Rodrigues, C.I. Jones, S. Buck, I. Wen-mei Hwu
Copyright Year	2010
Abstract	There are two avenues for many-core machines to gain higher performance: increasing the number of processors, and increasing the number of vector units in one SIMD processor. A truly scalable algorithm should take advantage of both. However, most past research on scalable memory allocators scales well with the number of processors, but poorly with the number of vector units in one SIMD processor. As a result, they are not truly scalable on many-core architectures. In this work, we introduce our proposed solution through the design of XMalloc, a truly scalable, efficient lock-free memory allocator. We will present (1) our solution for transforming traditional atomic compare-and-swap based lock-free algorithm to scale on SIMD architectures, and (2) a hierarchical cachelike buffer solution to reduce the average latency of accesses to non-scalable or slow resources such as main memory in a many-core machine. We implemented XMalloc as a memory allocator on an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU with 240 processing units. Our experimental results show that XMalloc scales very well with growth in both the number of processors and the number of vector units in each SIMD processor. Our truly scalable lock-free solution achieves 211 times speedup compared to the common lock-free solution.
Starting Page	1134
Ending Page	1139
File Size	350844
Page Count	6
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781424475476
e-ISBN	9781424475483
DOI	10.1109/CIT.2010.206
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2010-06-29
Publisher Place	United Kingdom
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Algorithm design and analysis malloc Instruction sets Scalability lock-free async-signalsafe Data structures availability scalability GPGPU CUDA Memory management Resource management
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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