Idempotent work stealing

Load balancing is a technique which allows efficient parallelization of irregular workloads, and a key component of many applications and parallelizing runtimes. Work-stealing is a popular technique for implementing load balancing, where each parallel thread maintains its own work set of items and occasionally steals items from the sets of other threads. The conventional semantics of work stealing guarantee that each inserted task is eventually extracted exactly once. However, correctness of a wide class of applications allows for relaxed semantics, because either: i) the application already explicitly checks that no work is repeated or ii) the application can tolerate repeated work. In this paper, we introduce idempotent work stealing, and present several new algorithms that exploit the relaxed semantics to deliver better performance. The semantics of the new algorithms guarantee that each inserted task is eventually extracted at least once?instead of exactly once. On mainstream proc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PPOPP
• Authors: Maged M. Michael, Martin T. Vechev, Vijay A. Saraswat
• Keywords: Parallel Computing, PPOPP 2009, Work Stealing Algorithms, Work Stealing Guarantee, Work Stealing Require