Analysis and Evaluation of Locks designed for NUMA system

Abstract

As computer systems grow to multi-core and multinode systems for higher performance, Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architecture is widely adopted in recent computer systems. In NUMA architectures, typical lock primitives such as spinlock are major performance bottleneck by causing frequent inter-node traffic. For improving performance in NUMA architectures, lock algorithm is cautiously considered to minimize cache coherence traffic and cache coherence misses. In this paper, we examine two locks designed for NUMA architecture: Cohort Lock and NUMA-Aware Reader-Writer Lock. We analyze the performance with various read-write workload ratios using a microbenchmark. We also evaluate with various settings to improve throughput in two tunable parameters: handoff bound in Cohort Lock and maximum patience limit in NUMA-Aware Reader-Writer Lock. Evaluation shows that throughput is improved up to 3% when we apply appropriate settings in tunable parameters.