Concurrent access of shared resources

Abstract

Apparatus, program products, and methods for managing access to shared resources by multiple processes in a multithreaded computer by means of a set of atomic operations that track the order in which requests to use a shared resource are received and the completion of such requests after they are received order of processing. The scheduling of a request is effectively deferred until the processing of all unscheduled requests received earlier than the most recently completed request has completed. In many instances, processing of requests can be performed non-atomically, thereby alleviating contention on shared resources. Additionally, multiple requests can be scheduled in batches, reducing the overhead associated with individual scheduling operations.

Description

Technical field

[0001] The present invention relates to computers and computer software, in particular to managing concurrent access to shared resources in a computer. Background technique

[0002] In today's society, with the increasing dependence on computers, computer technology has advanced to many frontiers in order to catch up with the ever-increasing demand. A specific topic of important research and development work is the problem of parallelism, that is, the performance problem of multitasking in parallel.

[0003] Many computer software and hardware technologies have been developed to help improve parallel processing. From a hardware point of view, computers increasingly rely on multiple microprocessors to provide ever-increasing workload capacity. Also, some microprocessors that support the ability to execute multiple threads in parallel have been developed, effectively providing many of the same performance gains that can be achieved through the use of multiple microp...

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