Knowing the Cost of Synchronization Primitives on Modern Hardware

SeongJae Park, Hyuck Han, Heon Y. Yeom

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2018.45.11.1210

In multi-core systems, which are widely prevalent, it is important to use an efficient concurrency control algorithm that utilizes every core. However, Amdahl’s Law states that a program cannot scale infinitely if it contains any unscalable sub-section. Furthermore, the Laws of Orders state that the expensive cost of synchronization for ordering in a concurrent algorithm cannot be eliminated. As a consequence, knowing the cost of each synchronization primitive is important for making tradeoff decisions regarding an algorithm. Although the rough costs of common synchronization primitives are already known, the result may be not applicable or inaccurate for a specific system, because the cost is hardware dependent. In this paper, we evaluate the cost of famous synchronization primitives on a modern system and discuss the results.