Atomic Instructions in Java

Short Description
operations in the Java programming language[7]. We propose idiom recognition. as a lightweight technique for expressing atomic instructions in a way that is …

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Content
Atomic Instructions in Java
David Hovemeyer, William Pugh, and Jaime Spacco
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA
fdaveho,pugh,jspaccog@cs.umd.edu
Abstract. Atomic instructions atomically access and update one or
more memory locations. Because they do not incur the overhead of lock
acquisition or suspend the executing thread during contention, they may
allow higher levels of concurrency on multiprocessors than lock-based
synchronization. Wait-free data structures are an important application
of atomic instructions, and extend these performance benets to higher
level abstractions such as queues. In type-unsafe languages such as C,
atomic instructions can be expressed in terms of operations on memory
addresses. However, type-safe languages such as Java do not allow
manipulation of arbitrary memory locations. Adding support for atomic
instructions to Java is an interesting but important challenge.
In this paper we consider several ways to support atomic instructions
in Java. Each technique has advantages and disadvantages. We propose
idiom recognition as the technique we feel has the best combination of
expressiveness and simplicity. We describe techniques for recognizing instances
of atomic operation idioms in the compiler of a Java Virtual
Machine, and converting such…