US 10,310,916 B2 · Scalable spinlocks for non-uniform memory access

Abstract

Techniques are disclosed to provide scalable spinlocks for non-uniform memory access (NUMA). In some examples, a global spinlock configured to protect access to a shareable resource is protected by multiple local spinlocks, which are each configured to control access to the global spinlock. In a multi-socket NUMA system, the global spinlock is allocated on one of the sockets, and the local spinlocks are distributed over the multiple sockets. In some embodiments, one local spinlock is allocated on each of the multiple sockets. In other embodiments, the multiple local spinlocks may be equally distributed over the NUMA sockets. When contention for the global spinlock is low, processes can attempt to directly acquire the global spinlock. In contrast, when contention for the global spinlock is high, processes need to first acquire one of the local spinlocks associated with the global spinlock before attempting to acquire the global spinlock.

Claims25

Dependent claims

A computer system comprising:

a plurality of sockets, each socket of the plurality of sockets comprising at least one central processing unit (CPU) and locally attached memory, wherein each CPU in each socket is communicatively coupled to the locally attached memory of the socket;
a global spinlock configured to control access to a shareable resource, the global spinlock comprising a first flag and a second flag;
and
a plurality of local spinlocks, each local spinlock of the plurality of local spinlocks configured to control access to the global spinlock;
wherein the first flag indicates whether the global spinlock is directly acquired, and the second flag indicates whether the global spinlock is acquired through a local spinlock configured to control access to the global spinlock.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Scalable spinlocks for non-uniform memory access

Life of this patent

Scalable spinlocks for non-uniform memory access

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims25