A Survey on the Performance of Different Mutex and Barrier Algorithms

One of the main issues with multicore computing is that it can be difficult to ensure coherence. One way of solving this issue is through the use of Mutual Exclusion Variables supported by hardware atomic primitives. In this review we will explore the performance of different mutex primitives and at the same time we will analyze the performance of barriers algorithms in personal computers and entry level servers. The results show that the TATAS with exponential backoff implementation is the fastest,-performing even the implementation found in POSIX pthread library. Similarly, results show that the barrier algorithm with the best performance is the sense-reverse barrier with exponential backoff.