Efficient Distributed Data Structures for Future Many-Core Architectures

We study general techniques for implementing distributed data structures on top of future many-core architectures with non cache-coherent or partially cache-coherent memory. With the goal of contributing towards what might become, in the future, the concurrency utilities package in Java collections for such architectures, we end up with a comprehensive collection of data structures by considering different variants of these techniques. To achieve scalability, we study a generic scheme which makes all our implementations hierarchical. We also describe a collection of techniques for further improving scalability in most implementations. We have performed experiments which illustrate nice scalability characteristics for some of the proposed techniques and reveal the performance and scalability power of the hierarchical approach. We distill the experimental observations into a metric that expresses the scalability potential of such implementations. We finally present experiments to study energy consumption aspects of the proposed techniques by using an energy model recently proposed for such architectures.