Low-Depth Parallel Algorithms for the Binary-Forking Model without Atomics

Abstract

The binary-forking model is a parallel computation model, formally defined by Blelloch et al. very recently, in which a thread can fork a concurrent child thread, recursively and asynchronously. The model incurs a cost of $\Theta(\log n)$ to spawn or synchronize $n$ tasks or threads. The binary-forking model realistically captures the performance of parallel algorithms implemented using modern multithreaded programming languages on multicore shared-memory machines. In contrast, the widely studied theoretical PRAM model does not consider the cost of spawning and synchronizing threads, and as a result, algorithms achieving optimal performance bounds in the PRAM model may not be optimal in the binary-forking model. Often, algorithms need to be redesigned to achieve optimal performance bounds in the binary-forking model and the non-constant synchronization cost makes the task challenging. Though the binary-forking model allows the use of atomic {\em test-and-set} (TS) instructions to reduce some synchronization overhead, assuming the availability of such instructions puts a stronger requirement on the hardware and may limit the portability of the algorithms using them. In this paper, we avoid the use of locks and atomic instructions in our algorithms except possibly inside the join operation which is implemented by the runtime system. In this paper, we design efficient parallel algorithms in the binary-forking model without atomics for three fundamental problems: Strassen's (and Strassen-like) matrix multiplication (MM), comparison-based sorting, and the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). All our results improve over known results for the corresponding problem in the binary-forking model both with and without atomics.