Reinventing Lock Modeling for Multi-Core Systems

Multi-core architectures have become mainstream. Trends suggest that the number of cores integrated on a single chip will continue to increase. However, lock contention in applications or kernels can degrade the scalability so significantly that the speedup decreases with the increasing number of cores (thrashing). Although the phenomenon can be easily reproduced on real multi-core platforms, existing lock models are not able to do so. To overcome the disadvantage, this paper proposes an analysis model which has the capability of capturing both the sequential execution of critical sections and the overhead of lock implementation. Numerical results indicate that thrashing can be observed by using the proposed model. Furthermore, this model can also be exploited to compare different mechanisms designed for avoiding the lock thrashing.