Highly-Efficient Persistent FIFO Queues

Abstract

In this paper, we study the question whether techniques employed, in a conventional system, by state-of-the-art concurrent algorithms to avoid contended hot spots are still efficient for recoverable computing in settings with Non-Volatile Memory (NVM). We focus on concurrent FIFO queues that have two end-points, head and tail, which are highly contended. We present a persistent FIFO queue implementation that performs a pair of persistence instructions per operation (enqueue or dequeue). The algorithm achieves to perform these instructions on variables of low contention by employing Fetch&Increment and using the state-of-the-art queue implementation by Afek and Morrison (PPoPP'13). These result in performance that is up to 2x faster than state-of-the-art persistent FIFO queue implementations.