Brief Announcement: A Persistent Lock-Free Queue for Non-Volatile Memory

Abstract

Non-volatile memory is expected to coexist with (or even displace) volatile DRAM for main memory in upcoming architectures. As a result, there is increasing interest in the problem of designing and specifying durable data structures that can recover from system crashes. Data-structures may be designed to satisfy stricter or weaker durability guarantees to provide a balance between the strength of the provided guarantees and performance overhead.

This paper proposes three novel implementations of a concurrent lock-free queue. These implementations illustrate the algorithmic challenges in building persistent lock-free data structures with different levels of durability guarantees. We believe that by presenting these challenges, along with the proposed algorithmic designs, and the possible levels of durability guarantees, we can shed light on avenues for building a wide variety of durable data structures. We implemented the various designs and evaluate their performance overhead compared to a simple queue design for standard (volatile) memory.