{"_id":"774","language":[{"iso":"eng"}],"abstract":[{"text":"Lock-free concurrent algorithms guarantee that some concurrent operation will always make progress in a finite number of steps. Yet programmers would prefer to treat concurrent code as if it were wait-free, guaranteeing that all operations always make progress. Unfortunately, designing wait-free algorithms is in general a complex undertaking, and the resulting algorithms are not always efficient, so most non-blocking commercial code is only lock-free, and the design of efficient wait-free algorithms has been left to the academic community. In [2], we suggest a solution to this problem. We show that, for a large class of lock-free algorithms, under scheduling conditions which approximate those found in commercial hardware architectures, lock-free algorithms behave as if they are wait-free. In other words, programmers can keep on designing simple lock-free algorithms instead of complex wait-free ones, and in practice, they will get wait-free progress. Our main contribution is a new way of analyzing a general class of lock-free algorithms under a stochastic scheduler. Our analysis relates the individual performance of processes with the global performance of the system using Markov chain lifting between a complex per-process chain and a simpler system progress chain. We show that lock-free algorithms are not only wait-free with probability 1, but that in fact a broad subset of lock-free algorithms can be closely bounded in terms of the average number of steps required until an operation completes.","lang":"eng"}],"date_published":"2014-01-01T00:00:00Z","publication_status":"published","citation":{"chicago":"Alistarh, Dan-Adrian, Keren Censor Hille, and Nir Shavit. “Brief Announcement: Are Lock-Free Concurrent Algorithms Practically Wait-Free?,” 50–52. ACM, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1145/2611462.2611502.","apa":"Alistarh, D.-A., Censor Hille, K., & Shavit, N. (2014). Brief announcement: Are lock-free concurrent algorithms practically wait-free? (pp. 50–52). Presented at the PODC: Principles of Distributed Computing, ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2611462.2611502","ista":"Alistarh D-A, Censor Hille K, Shavit N. 2014. Brief announcement: Are lock-free concurrent algorithms practically wait-free? PODC: Principles of Distributed Computing, 50–52.","ama":"Alistarh D-A, Censor Hille K, Shavit N. Brief announcement: Are lock-free concurrent algorithms practically wait-free? In: ACM; 2014:50-52. doi:10.1145/2611462.2611502","short":"D.-A. Alistarh, K. Censor Hille, N. Shavit, in:, ACM, 2014, pp. 50–52.","mla":"Alistarh, Dan-Adrian, et al. Brief Announcement: Are Lock-Free Concurrent Algorithms Practically Wait-Free? ACM, 2014, pp. 50–52, doi:10.1145/2611462.2611502.","ieee":"D.-A. Alistarh, K. Censor Hille, and N. Shavit, “Brief announcement: Are lock-free concurrent algorithms practically wait-free?,” presented at the PODC: Principles of Distributed Computing, 2014, pp. 50–52."},"conference":{"name":"PODC: Principles of Distributed Computing"},"extern":"1","month":"01","article_processing_charge":"No","date_updated":"2023-02-23T13:15:54Z","type":"conference","day":"01","author":[{"first_name":"Dan-Adrian","last_name":"Alistarh","id":"4A899BFC-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","full_name":"Alistarh, Dan-Adrian","orcid":"0000-0003-3650-940X"},{"full_name":"Censor Hille, Keren","first_name":"Keren","last_name":"Censor Hille"},{"last_name":"Shavit","first_name":"Nir","full_name":"Shavit, Nir"}],"page":"50 - 52","doi":"10.1145/2611462.2611502","title":"Brief announcement: Are lock-free concurrent algorithms practically wait-free?","status":"public","acknowledgement":"Dan Alistarh - Part of this work was performed while the author was a\r\nPostdoctoral Associate at MIT CSAIL, where he was supported by SNF Postdoctoral Fellows Program, NSF grant\r\nCCF-1217921, DoE ASCR grant ER26116/DE-SC0008923,\r\nand by grants from the Oracle and Intel corporations.\r\nKeren Censor-Hille - Shalon Fellow\r\nNir Shavit - This work was supported in part by NSF grants CCF-1217921 and CCF-1301926, DoE ASCR grant ER26116/DE-\r\nSC0008923, and by grants from the Oracle and Intel corporations.","year":"2014","publisher":"ACM","oa_version":"None","publist_id":"6882","user_id":"2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","date_created":"2018-12-11T11:48:26Z"}