Naama Ben David - Fast and Fair Lock Free Locks

Abstract : Locks are a fundamental building block in concurrent programs. However, they are also notorious for causing bottlenecks in highly contended or oversubscribed systems, since a slow thread holding a lock can block others. To overcome this drawback, considerable research has gone into designing lock-free algorithms, which avoid the bottleneck of locks, but often result in algorithms that are much harder to design and reason about. In this talk, I will present lock-free locks; a solution that offers the best of both worlds: the easy-to-use abstraction of classic locks with the strong lock-free progress guarantee.